Ledger Nano Gen5 Review: Does It Retire the Nano X?
We carried the new touchscreen Nano Gen5 alongside our long-serving Nano X for three weeks of transfers, staking and app installs to see whether Ledger's cheaper new flagship earns its price over the older device.
Our verdict
The Nano Gen5 is the easiest Ledger to actually use day to day: the E Ink touchscreen turns a security approval into a glance instead of a squint at two tiny buttons, and the jump to a CC EAL6+ chip is a real upgrade over the Nano X's EAL5+. It costs $80 more than the Nano X and carries less onboard storage, which matters only if you install a long list of coin apps at once. Anyone buying their first cold wallet should get the Gen5; existing Nano X owners with a working setup have no urgent reason to switch.
Best for: First-time cold storage buyers who want a touchscreen instead of two-button navigation
Our Nano X has sat in a drawer for three years, pulled out for the occasional transfer and put back once the two buttons had bruised our thumbs enough for one session. The Gen5 arrived promising to fix exactly that complaint, so we carried both devices for three weeks and ran the same approvals on each.
The screen is the whole upgrade
Ledger's older Nanos ask you to scroll through a transaction address one character at a time using two tiny side buttons, a process that turns verifying a long Ethereum address into a chore nobody actually does properly. The Gen5 replaces that with a 2.8-inch E Ink touchscreen you can tap and swipe. Confirming a send now takes a glance at the full address on one screen instead of squinting through a scroll.
Ledger's own launch article frames the device as a migration target for owners of other hardware wallets, not only an upgrade path for existing Ledger customers, and it walks through moving a seed phrase across brands rather than assuming everyone arrives from a Nano S or Nano X.
E Ink also means the screen holds its image without draining power, which matters on a device meant to sit untouched between uses. We left ours idle for two weeks and it woke up instantly with no re-pairing needed.
What actually changed under the hood
Ledger moved the Gen5 to a CC EAL6+ certified Secure Element, a genuine step up from the Nano X's EAL5+ chip. That certification measures how hard the chip is to physically attack, not how it behaves day to day, so most owners will never notice the difference directly. It matters if your threat model includes someone with physical access to the device and lab equipment, which is a real concern for holders of large amounts.
