09/07/2020 |Blog posts

The Bitcoin Cash network experienced a hard fork on November 15, 2018, leading to the emergence of Bitcoin SV (BSV). BSV is not natively supported in Ledger Live. Instead, users can manage their BSV using the Bitcoin Cash app on their Ledger device in combination with Electrum SV. More details can be found in this help center article.

We’ve often been asked why Ledger does not support BSV through a dedicated app and / or through Ledger Live. We would like to take the opportunity to explain our position regarding the direct support of forks.

To be eligible for Ledger support, a fork must comply to the following three items:

• The fork must be technically viable to receive enough mining power, having a strong dedicated community and a maintained code base.
• The crypto asset resulting from the fork must have received the support of reputable exchanges to ensure enough liquidity and trading pairs.
• The fork must have implemented a valid replay protection.

From our perspective, the last item is the most important as it protects the user from losing the original, non-forked asset through a transaction replay on the main chain.

Without this critical protection, Ledger will not support a fork.

Unfortunately, Bitcoin SV developers have decided to not implement replay protection. As a direct result, we’re forced to not support BSV purely from a security standpoint. As previously mentioned, a solution for advanced users exists with the combination of our Bitcoin Cash app and Electrum SV. However, Ledger does not provide support and users are advised to proceed at their own risk.

As a security technology provider, Ledger is agnostic to the type of crypto assets and does not take a preferential stance. All decisions to support or not support a fork are based on technical analysis.