Fadell is reinventing this gadget. He believes that by giving the Ledger Stax the panache of the hottest consumer gadgets, he will be able to redirect the crypto field, just as he helped kick off digital music and the smart home. 3/13
But in the weeks leading up to Ledger’s reveal of Stax, the arc of crypto has bent into a dunk tank. Timing, as product gurus know, is everything. Stax might be coming at the perfect moment, but it could as easily be the worst. 4/13
Pascal Gauthier, an early investor, believed that a fusty mentality was hindering the company's growth. He wanted to mix Ledger’s rigid security focus with Steve Jobs-level creativity. In 2018, he took part in a boardroom uprising that made him CEO. 5/13
Fadell met with Gauthier at a Paris café. They agreed that Ledger’s next product needed to have broader appeal. “I want to be the chief designer on that,” Fadell told Gauthier when he hit on a vision for Stax. The CEO immediately agreed. 6/13
As the guy who swept away the pain points of first-generation MP3 players and thermostats, Fadell was quick to understand the shortcomings of Ledger’s wallet: its screen was tiny, it lacked a keypad, setup took a glacial 30 minutes. 7/13
In Fadell’s mind, the wallet should be about the size of a credit card and have a touchscreen. He saw people owning more than one. He came up with the idea of having magnets to snap multiple units into a tidy stack like a cash bundle. 8/13
But a delightful wallet can only do so much; it’s not going to win over people who struggle through 40,000 word crypto explainers in allegedly plain language and still can’t figure it out. Does Ledger really believe it can transform the industry? 9/13
The implosion of FTX capped off a convulsive year for digital assets, yet the folks at Ledger say it’s been a vindication for their company. People who had been holding digital assets in exchanges are moving them to hardware wallets. 10/13
The Ledger-ites admit, though, that no matter how slick Stax is, it interacts with systems that have massive barriers to entry and existential questions of reliability. Still, they believe in the promise of crypto and the necessity of self-custody. 11/13
For now, Fadell’s latest tour de force stands as a friendly ambassador for a future that’s still far away for most of us, and a glimpse of how we might yet wind up with something useful from what so far has been a blockchain of fools. 12/13
Read Steven Levy’s full story of the iPod creator and the Web3 wallet at http://WIRED.com, and keep track of all our reporting by subscribing to WIRED newsletters today. https://wired.com/newsletter 13/13
