Ledger moves away from "hardware wallet" misnomer to the more appropriate "signer" terminology

Hardware wallet is a misnomer

For a decade, Ledger, Trezor, and similar companies have been calling their devices that sign for crypto transactions and signature requests as "hardware wallets".

This was a misnomer because the devices don't store any value in them and don't provide a view of an account/wallet. They just sign with a private key. Unlike software wallets, they often don't provide a front-end app for visualizing an account's assets.

Ledger has recently taken the first step to start calling them "signers" instead of "wallets".

It may take many years for the crypto community to stop calling these "hardware wallets". And maybe the community won't ever stop using the "hardware wallet" term, but at least starting to make laymen aware of these devices as being digital signers is a step in the right direction.

Using "Cold Wallet" to refer to hardware signers is an even worse misnomer.

Back before 2015 and these hardware devices became popular, "cold wallet" meant "cold storage". Exchanges had a "hot wallet" for daily transfers and a "cold wallet" for long term storage. At some point, the term got hijacked by laymen to be synonymous with "hardware wallet" even though they're very different things. Many hardware wallets are used to sign transactions for daily-use accounts that should be called "hot wallets".

And that created confusion over 2 sets of differing terminology.

In recent years, Ledger has avoided the term "cold wallet", but other companies like Trezor continue to misuse it.