The Button on My $79 Ledger Started Sticking

Two presses. The button gave me two for one on the night of March 14, at 11:20 pm, while I was sending $1,900 to an exchange deposit address — one firm push on the checkmark, and the Ledger Nano S Plus registered two inputs and bounced me back to the amount screen. I sat in the dark with the dog watching me from the couch and the transaction sitting unsent. I could not tell you if I felt relief. I felt motion where there should have been stillness.

The stakes were not the $1,900, since a deposit to my own exchange address can just be retried. The stake was the question underneath: if the confirm button can double-fire on a simple send, what does it do on the screen where I am rejecting a contract interaction, where one extra press is not an inconvenience but a decision. The wallet held $14,260 across three accounts. My thumb had been noticing somethin' off for two weeks, and I had been calling it imagination.

The fear that followed was the one every hardware wallet owner carries: the 24 words, the steel plate, the ceremony of recovery, the suspicion that fixing the device means exposing the seed. None of that turned out to be necessary. Ledger's repair process never asked for my seed phrase, not once, in any form, and the whole case was decided by a video of my thumb and a receipt from November 2024.

the button started sticking in march

March 2 was the first real symptom, a single press on the confirm button advancing the screen and then advancing it again half a second later, and I wrote it off as me. By March 9 I had a rule: press, wait, look. By March 11 the rule had failed twice in one session. The button travel had changed too, a mushier bottom to the press, the kind of thing you only notice on a device you have unlocked 400 times. Four hundred unlocks teach you exactly how a button is supposed to feel.

a reject that confirmed

The moment that ended the denial was a rejection. March 12, canceling a $400 exchange of ETH inside Ledger Live, thumb on reject, and the screen flashed a confirm state for half a blink before settling back. Nothing executed — I checked Etherscan and the Live history twice that night — but I lay there doin' the arithmetic anyway. A stuck confirm on a send to my own address is a retry. A stuck anything on a contract approval is a different category of problem, and that category has no undo.

24 words on a steel plate

The seed lives on a steel plate in a fire safe, stamped letters, no photo, no cloud note, no copy anywhere in the world. The plan, if the device ever fully died, was to buy a new device and enter the words on the new device's own buttons, never into a computer, never into a phone, never into anything with a network chip. I had rehearsed that plan in my head maybe sixty times and never once in real life. The gap between rehearsed and real is where the fear lived. The repair process, as it turned out, never made me cross it.

what support is allowed to ask

Ledger support can ask for plenty: your name, your receipt, a video of the defect, a shipping address. What they cannot ask for — what no legitimate wallet company will ever ask for — is the 24 words, and knowing that did not fully stop the old pull when the chat window opened, the itch to just cooperate fully. The rep, a patient person named Kris, answered my paranoid questions without a script: no one at the company can see my keys, anyone emailing me for the words is a thief, and the device does not need 'em back to be fixed. I took a screenshot of that answer. Some reassurances you keep.

finding a receipt from 2024

The receipt hunt took an hour and felt worse than the button problem. November 14, 2024, $79, Ledger.com, order confirmation buried under two years of airline emails and a dentist reminder. I forwarded it to the ticket at 1:05 am and sat there thinking about how the one document that proves ownership of a $14,260 wallet is a receipt for $79 that almost died in a promotions tab. Print the receipt. Put it with the plate. That pairing is now permanent in my house.

the rma, no seed inserted

The RMA itself was boring, which is the highest compliment I can pay a security process. Ticket opened March 15 with a 40-second video of the double press. Shipping label on March 17. The twelve-month warranty had lapsed in November, and Kris bumped the case to a goodwill replacement anyway, citing the documented hardware defect — my $79 from November 2024 bought more goodwill than I anticipated. The replacement arrived March 24, nine days after the ticket went in. Genuine check, new PIN, and then the only moment my seed was involved: typed on the replacement's own buttons, at my kitchen table, with the router unplugged, cuz at that point why not.

nine days, two devices

The cost accounting: $0 replacement, $0 shipping, $0 support, against the original $79. The old unit goes back on their label and is now a paperweight in a drawer, cuz I do not need a defective confirm button anywhere near money again, even at drawer distance. Total downtime was nine days, during which I moved nothin' and checked CoinMarketCap more than the portfolio deserved. Prices did not care about my button. The chain kept its own schedule the whole time.

the first press after

The first real send on the replacement was the same $1,900, March 26, same deposit address. One press. The screen advanced once, the way a screen is supposed to, and I sat there a full three seconds waiting for the ghost second press, which never came. Two presses opened this story. One press closed it. That is it. That is the whole repair log.