Tony Fadell Is Trying to Build the iPod of Crypto

The city of Paris has been washed away by a clean rain and the sun is not shining. I hail a cab. Even after six years abroad, there is still Detroit in his voice.

Everyone is talking in English at the meeting. A group of people are sitting. There are labels on the walls such as photo assets and view from land. The man is walking to the front of the room.

He says it will take seven weeks to pull it off. Will we be able to pull this off?

People in the room will pull it off. They are ready for the next task. The people say what they have done since they last met. What is the drop dead date on the blanks? There is a press release. Is it possible that we are recording the click-click? I would like to hear it.

Everyone is reminded that Fadell once led the team at Apple that created the iPod with its elegant clicky wheel and revolutionary interface. He co founded and created the smart thermostat that was acquired by the search engine company.

The room is being looked at by Fadell to see the details of the product's launch. A man with a video camera is following a person.

A group of photos of the device are being looked at by Fadell. There is a hardware wallet. The lock is a physical one. A private key can be difficult to keep safe when you own cryptocurrencies. The wallet is made of steel and Silicon, but so far it has been off-putting. It's much like the coin itself. This is Fadell's first major design project in a long time. He believes that by giving it the flair of the hottest consumer gadgets, he will lead the way in the field of digital music and smart homes.

The photos of the credit card-sized wallet and its innovative E Ink touchscreen are shown. The price will be $279 when it's revealed on December 6. It's a rounding error for people who buy Bored apes. The screen wraps around one side to make it look like a book. The photo doesn't show what's going on. He says it is recti linear and 2D. Too little spine. I don't feel the curve He looks unhappy. It's so dark.

The critique was picked up by David Sloo, a user experience designer. Is it possible to be less Darth Vader and more Rebels?

I agree with Fadell. It's all about the Empire, that's who we are.

The next panel is called MANIFESTO. There are slogans written on the glass.

It's the new money called cryptocurrencies.

Human rights include security.

Financial freedom is a new thing.

The first device that protects your most valuable assets.

Fadell looks at a book.

Stax we trust

He isn't happy with the prominence of the [L], the Ledger logo, which is in a military-style typeface. People need to remember the brand. He says that in five years you will think of the actor. The Apple logo is similar to the brand.

The comparison doesn't make sense. The company is small, its product is foreign to most Earthlings, and its niche has been undergoing months of shock treatment. The man seems unperturbed.

He said it was coming together. It's forty-nine days.

During those 49 days, there will be a bend in the path of the coin. Product experts know that timing is the most important thing. At the right time, Stax could be coming. It could be worse.

A group of people called La Maison duBitcoin started a company called Ledger. They wanted to make a wallet for people who like the digital currency. They wouldn't park their holdings in an exchange or leave their private keys on a phone or laptop because it's too hackable. In this world, trust is a bad word. Thousands of people lost their investments in a hack of Mt.Adorable. Many customers had their life savings wiped out.

Even when the server went down and the exchanges went bust, consumers would still keep their keys in a hardware wallet. The wallet would be used to verify the transaction on the phone or laptop. Your private key wouldn't cross the gap between the more secure devices.

The company's first wallet was not really special. It met a need among some people. The subsequent models had small displays. 20 percent of the world'scryptocurrencies and 30 percent of NFTs are now secured by the 5 million wallet sold by the company. People who are true believers wear wallet around their neck.

By the end of the year, the market had fallen into one of its cold spells. The company's growth was being hampered by a fusty mentality, according to an investor. The French engineer decides everything, which is why the French always come up with innovations, but we're not good at taking them to market and making it a business. He was put in charge of the board after they revolted.

After working in ad tech at Yahoo and then as COO of a successful French company, Gauthier wanted to move Ledger from the "B to G" market to the nontechnical world. He wanted to combine the verve of Steve Jobs with the security focus of the man. Gauthier is dressed as if he is waiting for a Sun Valley invite, in a black vest. I would like to build a company in Europe that will compete with Apple and others.

He thought it was time to shake off its Frenchness. If you want to market and sell, you need Americans, he says. There is nothing else to do.

Gauthier befriended an expatriate and began courting him. Ian Rogers is a 50-year-old with long blond hair, tattoos on his fingers, and a résumé full of trophy jobs, but he's not the only one. He played in a high school band called Albino K-mart Shoppers, was webmaster for the Beastie Boys, CEO of Beats Music, and founder of Apple Music, all of which brought him to the City of Lights.

He was willing to listen to Gauthier. He had read the first paper in the field in 2009. Gauthier offered him a chance to take part in a revolution of ownership anchored by the Gibraltar-like certainty of private keys. A lot of humans, if not all of them, will own digital items in the future. When people said not everyone would have a phone, it was the same thing.

He respected the business model because it sold actual devices. The private wallet was at the center of the coin vision. Rogers said that the people at the company wouldn't work at the company. They don't like working at a bank. They believe in self- punishment.

Rogers wanted to make sure he did his homework. A parent friend from Paris took it upon himself to investigate. Fadell was an investor at that time. It was a quiet time during the first months of the Pandemic. Tony didn't cross the transom of his door, according to Rogers. Fadell was writing a book about his career and giving product advice to companies he funded. Rogers wanted to know what the company's biggest strength was, so he looked at its security.

The company's chief technology officer was Charles Guillemet. The Donjon, a jacked-up security lab, was created inside Guillemet's headquarters, behind a giant medieval-style door off a Paris lane. The Donjon has a 21st century version of a lab. The lasers poke at the chips to see how they would fail. Guillemet was against the idea of people securing their assets on laptops or phones. He didn't like fingerprints or face recognition. Your fingerprints are public and can be used to make counterfeit goods.

The more time he spent with Guillemet, the more he was convinced. He believes in the technology despite not believing in all the hype. Rogers was told by him that he was the real thing. In January 2021, Rogers became the company's chief experience officer, and later that year, he hired an editor in chief. She oversaw a project called the Ledger Academy that focused on cryptocurrencies. The nontechnical hires were not understood by some of the engineers. They were seen as part of the problem by Gauthier. I said we could sell tens of millions of devices and make billions of dollars. They said, 'Yeah, whatever.'

Rogers might have been the most significant contributor. He saw a weakness in the plan. You had to enter a four- or eight-digit password in order to gain access to the wallet. He wondered what a better solution would be.

At a Paris cafe, Fadell and Gauthier talked about the need for the next product to have broader appeal. Fadell kept coming up with new ideas. He met with Gauthier again after hitting on a vision. He wants to be the chief designer. Gauthier agreed right away.

The gig began with a lot of ideas. As the guy who gave away the pain points of first- generation mp3 players and thermostats, Fadell was quick to understand the limitations of the wallet. Its screen was small, it didn't have a keyboard or a keypad, and its appearance and charm were similar to an early-2000susb stick. Users were told to set aside at least 30 minutes.

The wallet should be large enough to hold a credit card and have a screen. It should take no more than three minutes. The lock screen should allow you to personalize it. He wanted people to own multiple wallet for each category of digital collecting or banking. The idea of stacking them on top of each other was something he liked. He came up with the idea of using magnets to attach the units. The device was called Stax.

Fadell started prototyping using green plastic toy blocks and magnets after surveying all possible electronic components. dell wanted people to be able to leave their wallet untouched for months and still have power when they get their wallet back The screen had to be energy efficient. The tech isn't there yet but color would have been nice. The screen on the ReMarkable tablets was torn apart to see how it would display a keyboard.

He wanted the screen to be extended so people could label it. He contacted an old friend, the UK venture capitalist, who had once been involved in an unsuccessful ebook device with advanced E Ink. Plastic Logic was based in Germany and was making custom displays. They were able to bend. The YotaPhone was the only phone that used the curved display. At a low cost, Fadell wanted to make hundreds of thousands of screens.

A sophisticated attacker could pick up electronic signals leaking through the screen and figure out the pin code if they had the right equipment. The screen had to be protected so it didn't emit exhaust. Their own driver is the code that helps make the screen look good. Rogers says that using a driver written by someone in China compromises security.

The lead of its new flagship product was being shown up by Fadell. He was granted significant equity despite never becoming an employee. Some people didn't welcome him. Is it possible to put magnets on a hardware wallet. Is it possible to add a curved screen. It was from a supplier who had never done that before. Fadell can be hard to like. I don't know how many times they'd say "Oh this seems difficult" A person says it. I told you that we were going to do this. How many times do I have to tell you that it will happen?

Gauthier had to convene his engineers early on. All those things had never been done before, they said. Shut the fuck up. We will do it if he says we will. Some of the engineers described Fadell's style to me in a way that made me feel good. Likes Steve Jobs. If I had spoken French, I might have cornered them and gotten more candor.

There were other benefits to having Fadell on board. In early 2022, the manufacturing giant that was retained to assemble the Stax units said that it wouldn't be able to meet the deadline for shipping final products. Is June possible? Gauthier said they were freaked out. Fadell said he had this. He explained that the deadline was important and that it would be a great benefit if he looked into it. We were back on track after fifteen minutes.

The first prototypes are completed when I arrive in Paris in October. Several units are neatly stacked on the table in Rogers' apartment in the Marais section, which is accessible through an unmistakably Parisian courtyard. The phrase "Banks are dead" is on the back of one of them. Rogers is buying an NFT. The transaction is done on a phone. When it's time to verify Rogers' private key, the Stax wakes him up to warn him of a pending transaction. He buys it when he punches in his password on the display. Within a few minutes, he can see the image on his phone and change it so it shows up in a gray scale when he ships it to his Stax.

It might be difficult to imagine a mass movement of people towards digital goods. With secure, well-designed hardware as a bedrock, people will gravitate tocryptocurrencies to verify their identities. Think driver's licenses, passports, and proof that you passed your dentistry boards. It was ironic that when Rogers attended the NFT NYC conference earlier this year, he had the token required to register for exclusive events, he said. The technology I use to get into parties is better than the technology I use to get into our country. It's in your hardware wallet when you're in the future.

To advance this vision, Ledger has only met with consultants from Estonia, a nation known for embracing futuristic schemes. A delightful wallet isn't going to win over people who struggle through 40,000 words of explainers and still can't figure it out. Does Ledger think it can make a difference?

That is the hope according to Fadell. It's time to have that iPod moment. You can't just integrate it into a phone. It's important to have a physical key in your life.

We are sitting in a sunny Paris flat. Less than a month later, the world of the internet would be destroyed by a fake king.

Gauthier, Rogers, Fadell, and Wengroff met in a bistro in New York City in November. I inquired about the elephant in the room as the espressos were being pulled. Sam Bankman- Fried was the man who presided over the biggest disaster in the history of the industry. Go x. Customer deposits were diverted from FTX to cover the failing high-risk investments handled by his company. Some customers found out they couldn't withdraw their funds. His crew had destroyed at least a billion dollars' worth of wealth, stiffing more than a million customers and ruining the reputation of the company.

The year ended with a bang. The price of cryptocurrencies has gone down. Launching Stax now would seem like a new cocktail in the lounge of the Titanic.

The people at Ledger don't think so. FTX has helped their company. It was a triumph of self-control. People who had been holding their digital assets inside exchanges were now moving them to hardware wallet On a Sunday, the sales record was set, and now it was on the verge of being broken again.

As customers poured in, and existing users who hadn't fired up their wallet in months suddenly decided to update the firmware,Ledger's server was temporarily swamped, and for an hour or so, customers couldn't update their software Some became frightened. The company's support team sent out a message saying that their assets were safe. That is what self-Custody is all about. That phrase became a sign that a house of cards was falling and your assets were gone after SBF.

Imagine the reluctance of Web3 holdouts if that hiccup were to happen. Maybe it's not realistic for newcomers to pay almost $300 for a wallet that has a cool picture on it, but still depends on a somewhat impenetrable network and a question of reliability.

The need for self-custody will prevail in the eyes of the Ledger-ites. The last 50 years have seen atoms move to bits. Rogers admits that Stax interacts with systems that have large barriers to entry. I spent an hour with him after breakfast trying to set him up to buy and sell NFTs. Getting the wallet to confirm my identity was easy, but getting the currency to purchase the funky artworks Rogers likes proved to be difficult. He said that it was where the internet was in 1993. The iPod came out in the early days of digital music and took a long time to catch on. I don't know if we are the Apple of Web3. Rogers said something. Are we the one of the two?

There is nowhere to go but up after seeing the FTX of Web3. Tony Fadell is a hardware ambassador for a future that is still far away for most of us, and a glimpse of how we might end up with something useful, accessible, and enriching.

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