The Ledger Nano S is one of the most popular and secure ways to store Bitcoin and alt coins. When you own cryptocurrencies, you need to protect your confidential data and the access to your funds.
By using the Ledger Nano S (Nano S), secrets like your private keys are never exposed. All sensitive operations are isolated inside your hardware wallet within a state-of-the-art Secure Element, locked by a PIN code. Transactions can’t get tampered with and can only be verified physically on the embedded screen with a simple press of a button.
The following guide will walk you through which coins and tokens are currently being supported by the Nano S, including links to the Ledger site for further explanation.
With the Nano S you can send and receive payments, check your accounts and manage multiple addresses for each currency from the same device. The Nano S also supports the FIDO® Universal Second Factor standard that simplifies the authentication process on compatible online services such as GMail, Dashlane,Dropbox or GitHub.
The Nano S is the cheapest of the three major hardware wallets with a screen; it generally cost about $95. The Ledger team released the device in August 2016 is has since become one of the most well-known Bitcoin security companies.
Holding your coins on a Ledger Nano S means you are keeping them in ‘cold storage’. Cold storage refers to any type of wallet that is stored offline, independent of any internet connection. Because of this feature, it cannot be hacked remotely.
According to the Ledger site, the Nano S natively supports the following coins:
- Ark
- Bitcoin
- Bitcoin Gold
- Bcash
- Dash
- Digibyte
- Dogecoin
- Ethereum
- Ethereum Classic
- Expanse
- Hcash
- Komodo
- Litecoin
- NEO
- PIVX
- PoSW
- Qtum
- Ripple
- Starts
- Stealthcoin
- Stellar
- Stratis
- Ubiq
- Vertcoin
- Viacoin
- Zcash
Clicking on the coin link above will direct you to the Ledger site with step by step directions including pictures on how to install and manage each of them with your Ledger device.
The Ledger Nano S operates with its own cryptocurrencies wallet interfaces: Ledger Apps (free Google Chrome applications). You can also use other compatible software wallets from the following list:
Other Ethereum tokens (ERC20 tokens) can be managed using Nano S when used in-conjunction with the MyEtherWallet only (it won’t work with the Ledger Wallet application alone):
MyEtherWallet is a popular online Ethereum wallet which you can use as an alternative to the Ledger Ethereum Chrome application. It supports natively the Nano S on Chrome and Opera, without the need to install any app or plug-in.
To manage your Ethereum account, go to the MyEtherWallet website (not the Chrome extension plugin) and select the “Send Ether & Tokens” tab. Plug your Ledger device, select the Ethereum app and go to the settings of the app to activate “Browser support”:
This will enable the direct connection to the browser and MyEtherWallet will be able to detect your device (note that if you wish to use the Ledger Ethereum Chrome application, you’ll have to disable Browser support).
Select the “Ledger Wallet” option and click on “Connect your Ledger Wallet”:
If you have an ERC20 token which is not supported by MyEtherWallet, you can access your account on MyEtherWallet
and choose “Add Custom Token” with the following information related to the token: Contract address, Token Symbol and its decimals.
The Ledger Manager app is available for free on Chrome for Windows, Mac OS, Linux or Chrome OS. It runs flawlessly with your Ledger device.
All Ledger Apps are fully open source, so anyone can access the full source code to authenticate code paths and contribute to the development.
You can extend your Ledger Wallet features by installing new applications using the official Ledger App Store.
The app helps you upgrade the firmware of your device to keep your Ledger Wallet up-to-date in order to benefit from the latest security features available.
When a new alt coin is added to the Ledger Nano S, you will only need to download the last app (free) or update the firmware. If you want to check if a cryptocurrency is planned to be supported, you can consult their
Ledger is using this roadmap board to communicate about its future consumers products, features and implementations. This is only informative and no way binding. They use the community feedback to help us prioritize developments, but Ledger will always keep full
