For those unfamiliar with me, I worked at a crypto wallet startup called Ballet for 3 years. Ballet designed & produced user friendly self-custody hardware wallets. Kind of like Ledger, but not really. I’d be a millionaire by now if I was given a dollar for everytime I had to explain this difference.
Ballet had two main offices: one based in Shanghai and the other based in Las Vegas. I was based in the Shanghai office, which was where most of the personnel of the company were located. I was fortunate enough to be there during the 2021 bull run where Ballet was able to raise a substantial Series A investment round, with the majority of the time from then on surviving through the depths of the bear market and multiple unfortunate personnel layoffs.
I was given a management title within our marketing department mainly responsible for our digital marketing ventures and forging strategic ecosystem partnerships. This covered a myriad of hats: marketing strategy, technical content creation, content management, digital ad spend, influencer marketing, community development, business development, livestream/podcasting, product marketing, sales, and even some web development and recruiting. It’s safe to say I was a ninja there.
With all that being said, I want to share some of the takeaways from working at Ballet, specifically in the context of what it’s like working for a crypto wallet startup. Some of the good and some of the bad, but nothing derogatory. Mostly insightful feedback.
Just as a tangent, even though I did technically work for a tech startup in Shanghai, the whole 996 work culture luckily wasn’t practiced at Ballet. But it was still a tech startup in the crypto industry (with an emphasis on both). Taking calls at midnight with partners based in the western hemisphere wasn’t considered out of the norm. And in general, If you’ve ever worked in a tech startup in China, then you’d be well familiar with the operating speed of such a working culture. Things and people move so fast here in China compared to other countries. There is a certain breakneck speed that you pick up here.
As a wallet, no strings attached. One of the best things about working for a crypto wallet project is that you can be completely unbiased in your web3 beliefs. You’re not pigeonholed into supporting a particular blockchain or NFT project or some overpromising DeFi platform, but rather you’re privileged to be crypto-agnostic.
Wallets are literally the first point of contact for new users coming into the space. To put it more directly, you NEED a crypto wallet if you want to do anything in crypto. This made my job so much easier and prudent. And most importantly, it was understandable what we did. Have you ever had conversations with a BD working for an abstract token project? Doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner or proclaimed expert in the space, confusion and skepticism are the usual vibes you pick up when listening to their elevator pitches.
There might be some limitations on the type of crypto wallet you’re working for, ie. working for ColdCard might not be the most ideal place to learn about web3 wallets, unless your deadset on being a bitcoin maxi. And Ballet, for example, didn’t support certain chains such as Solana or Cardano, but ultimately we were able to work with at least 80% of all crypto projects. Most projects were EVM-based anyways which was no issue for Ballet support. Wallets also had the luxury of being unbiased in the tech they integrated in-app. Depending on your user base and their market demands, integrating the likes of ENS, Unstoppable Domains, MoonPay, WalletConnect and etc. were endless. But there needed to be a limitation of the amount of swiss army knife features you shipped out. Not all were heavily in demand and not all were assumed to NOT sacrifice the security of your codebase. Some wallets, such as Trust Wallet, seemed to support everything and anything under the sun.
I’d honestly recommend anyone interested in a career in this industry to work for a crypto wallet. You’ll learn so much about private key tech, which is essential for understanding how crypto ultimately works. It’s tech that will NEVER fade away.
Security is as relative as the knowledge of one’s own achievable security. Picture this: if you’re new to the space and need a wallet, here are some options to get you setup:
Get yourself a Ballet wallet that comes ready to use out of the box with the key entropy components and public address preconfigured for a no-hassle setup. Just make sure you don’t drop and lose it anywhere and that you keep it in a secure place because its keys can easily be exposed to the naked eye.
Download the Metamask browser extension that allows you to generate your own private key with its own pre-configured TRNG but pray you don’t click on any phishing links when using the same browser. Or pray that your computer isn’t already infected with phishing malware.
Purchase a Ledger hardware wallet that prompts you to write down and properly store 24 written words on paper. And then jump through the fancy electronic hoops of software installation and passcode memorization all while being forced to update your software and firmware on a weekly basis.
Wipe clean an old laptop and have it fully air gapped for you to set up Bitcoin Core’s wallet. Do the same thing with a laptop connected to the internet so you can run it as an operating node and broadcast your transactions that you’ll have to sign on the offline laptop. And then set up a proper protocol when transfering your unsigned/signed transactions to and from each laptop. Oh and are you using PSBTs?
Flip a coin 256 times with heads being marked as 1 and tails as 0. Convert these binary digits to base-10 decimal notation where you’ll then convert it to 24 mnemonic words that you’ll then need to use with an HMAC to derive master public and private keys that will then generate parent and child keys. How deep do you want your key derivation to go? Just hope that the open-source tools you find have been sufficiently battle-tested.
Do you see where I am getting at?
Every relative level of wallet creation expertise has its own challenges that can’t be avoided. Introducing a layer of abstraction for improved UX also introduces another layer of blind trust you’re giving up, while obviating certain mundane practices.
Every wallet claims to have the best security but the reality is that for the most part, they aren’t wrong (assuming randomness of its key entropy is on par). A hardware wallet boasting a CC EAL 6+ isn’t going to deter users from using a device with a CC EAL 5+. Experiencing wallet hiccups usually fall to the fault of oneself or due to the environment users place their wallet in that gets them into trouble. You can’t break the encryption of Metamask’s browser extension security but you can inadvertently click on a wrong link and find your wallet drained instantly.
By now for most crypto natives, it’s well acknowledged that a mobile or desktop wallet is more prone to phishing attempts than an offline hardware wallet. But you need to understand what’s suitable for a complete newbie. Pushing an artisanal, privacy focused wallet onto a newbie that’s just trying to purchase $100 of bitcoin isn’t ideal, nor practical. It’s the same way how driving stick is merely becoming obsolete.
Insurance salesmen without the shirt and tie. Humorously, there were many moments during my time at Ballet where I felt akin to an insurance salesman. It wasn’t glamorous but it was well understood. Ballet was dead focused on cold storage products where at times we would sing the same tune of “protecting your legacy” in our marketing battle chants. “Not your keys, not your keys” was another repetitious line. But in an industry where web3 security is top of mind, it’s a practice that everyone NEEDED but neither WANTED. In reality, most crypto users felt perfectly fine having their assets on a centralized exchange with the well documented knowledge of what could happen (and will happen eventually) to centralized exchanges. They go belly up on an annual basis.
What we sold wasn’t necessarily on the minds of many crypto users nor was it considered “sexy” enough in web3, but it was essential. Letting your crypto sit on something that has a history of hiccups is a game of hot potato. You never know you’ll need cold storage until you need it.
At the end of the day, we’re provisioning a method for holding your private keys with a companion app that allows you to manage your digital assets. That’s it. There’s nothing gimmicky about that. It’s simple vanilla insurance against the idiocy of centralized entities. This made it very comfortable as we’re not judged as we would be judged if we were a DeFi project or some other gambling-like platform pushing out promised astronomical yields of some sort. Wallets were straightforward to understand and everyone needed it. Did it shine with all the other bells & whistles in the space? No, but it was honest. Honest, yet bland, like a shirt & tie getup.
The uphill battle of crypto marketing. The one facet that everyone seems to have an opinion on is marketing. From external advisors to internal employees, everyone is a self-proclaimed expert in marketing. The reality is that everyone’s opinion on what should work in marketing is akin to everyone’s opinion on politics. Some strategies will and will not work. Solid execution and persistence is a challenge in an industry that changes by the minute. It's also astronomically hard to do it all while running a tight ship in the marketing department at Ballet. At its peak we had only about 5 people within marketing. What people don’t also realize is that marketing covers so many different disciplines that it requires more than just 5 people.
Marketing is hard. Marketing in crypto is tenfold that. Execution of a solid marketing plan is half the battle with the resulting ROI being a tossup.
Moreover, a large portion of crypto marketing is reliant on digital marketing advertisement. But you’re bound at times by the unfriendly crypto policies of many traditional ad platforms which forces you to rely on the word of 3rd party agencies that don’t necessarily deliver. Not only are there scams in web3, but there are scams in web3 marketing. We get inundated on a daily basis with messages from external web3 marketing agencies promising to double or triple our social media exposure. In reality, these services are just deploying bots masked as social media engagement boosters. By now, everyone can see right through any attempts of fluffing up your follower count.
We once worked with an external marketing agency that provided content creation and marketing strategy services. The result was mediocre content that an intern could’ve put together for a fraction of the exuberant cost they charged us. Most of the time it was us putting in most of the work anyways. Marketing strategy and content creation needs to be in-house. Whether it be writing technical blogs or creating product photos, there’s no better people that understand what to slap together than the people working behind the said product. But creating powerful content necessitates the need for a versatile graphic designer alongside your social media guru. You can’t have one or the other. Graphic designers know how to use the tools, but they don’t understand crypto enough to make impactful contextual content. And vice versa with the social media guru, they understand crypto and all the jargon that come along with it, but don’t have the expert skills in using the proper tools to create vivid, aesthetic content. Boasting such a duo in a team is as difficult as having a trustless and user-friendly wallet. But striking a balance is more practical. I was fortunate to have in-house designers that worked side by side with me. Being able to bounce and sharpen ideas in the office is invaluable.
Ultimately our bread and butter was showing out at conferences, which we made sure we were noticed. Most of the time we’d have a popping booth that would attract hordes of folks. If you were attending these conferences, you wouldn’t miss us. We had an offline physical product that needed to be shown physically offline in person to people. There’s only so much you can do with it online.
The topic of crypto marketing could be dedicated to its own blog touching other topics such as influencer management, partnerships, and etc. The scope of marketing covers a wide breadth and depth with no silver bullet. Being able to try and test a slew of creative ideas was like the art of memeology, you never know which one will hit virality despite your content.
Embrace the haters. What people needed to understand is that at its core, Ballet is fundamentally the same as any crypto wallet: provisioning a secure private key storage method. But its ideological & product design approach is vastly different from other crypto wallets. The open-source wallet standards of BIP38 and BIP39 are incorrectly compared and contrasted by everyone. So making a comparison between Ballet and Metamask or Ballet and Ledger is ultimately futile. Critics would naively fall into this misjudgment in comparison without actually digging deeper on the why we use BIP38 in our 2FKG manufacturing process. This ignorance leads to twitter trolls and haters proclaiming Ballet being insecure or worse, a scam, despite being 5 years into the game with zero incidents of product mishaps or loss of user funds.
How do you throw shade at a product you’ve never used nor understood?
These days they mainly attempt to purport the inferiority of Ballet to some other irrelevant factor that wouldn’t hold up in an argument. A product’s functional utility is not tied to what your myopic perception is for the team or certain individual.
If you were good enough, being able to force your haters into 2nd questioning their own knowledge of wallet security was the ultimate win for shutting them up. But it takes practice to get to that level, therefore embrace the haters.
Nobody is consistent with their crypto values & beliefs. “I don’t trust this wallet, but check out this pump & dump token”. Oh you got to love the hypocrisy in crypto…
Unintelligently throwing shade on Ballet’s security while trying to shill some $DUMP token exemplifies the endless amounts of incomprehensible riff raff that goes on in this space.
Are we a web3 or an e-commerce company? Ballet had the dual role of going to market as a web3 company and at the same time, properly handling e-commerce operations. This was way under appreciated. Many crypto teams had the luxury of operating fully decentralized because all they do is software or provide some digital services. But Ballet ran the whole stack of departments in order to fulfill international shipments while juggling jurisdictions in multiple countries and holding regulatory FinCen licenses in the US. On top of that, manage a rigorous and error-free opsec protocol for the manufacturing of our wallets.
So next time if you ever hear people saying Ballet isn’t web3-ish enough, tell them we were juggling two acts at once. A feat 95% of all crypto projects don’t need to deal with.
“Sell me this pen”. Ballet was notorious for its aggressive sales approach, mainly due to the traditional business-like mindset of our commander in chief. We were the first and last on the conference floor. We swarmed passer-byers like old school stock brokers on the trading floors. We strived for sky-high sales KPIs at conferences that forced one to constantly be on one's toes. Some would consider it ruthless. And at the time it’s not hard to think this is too much of a stretch for a mere crypto wallet team. But reflecting back it’s a learning experience that you don’t realize you need until you become your own entrepreneur. Pull down all the marketing glitter and what you still need is the basic fundamental skill of being able to sell face-to-face.
I’ve seen a multitude of people come from big corporate into crypto only to find out that they have to face the daunting reality of being able to cold sell the well abstract merits of decentralization. A large facet of a crypto career is being present at conferences or at local offline meetups. If you can’t put up the conviction of the product/service your project is selling, then you’re not ready for crypto yet. First focus on the why of your product/service, and then most importantly, focus on the why of bitcoin. More often than not, when you’re chatting with family/friends, the conversation always goes full circle to the original intent of what bitcoin is for. Being able to articulate bitcoin to a newbie should be a prerequisite. I’ve seen a handful of crypto folks struggle with just that alone.
Beware of the private key extremists. There are those in the space that will live and die by only a particular method in private key generation and storage. Being able to roll your own entropy and generate your public addresses in an air-gapped fashion with open-source tools is the only way to achieve supreme security, isn’t it? Isn’t that what being a true believer in this space should adhere to? The reality is that such an artisanal (and arcane) method is only attainable by the 0.1% of all crypto users.
In the eyes of these private key extremists, anything else is considered inferior and should be banned in practice. Designing a solution that makes it easy for people to self-custody while sacrificing control over the private key generation is a HUGE SIN! There was absolutely zero compromising with these folks that only imposed their self-righteousness of private key security. Just think about where the industry would be in if everyone had this mindset. There would be absolutely zero innovation. Instead of “onboarding the next billion” we’d be hashtagging “onboarding the next hundred”.
We don’t need to raise and butcher our own cows just for a luscious piece of ribeye anymore.
At the end of the day, we’re sitting on layers of abstraction that have obfuscated the need to hand calculate your RIPEMD160 public key hash from an uncompressed public key pair (If you don’t understand what this means then give yourself a tap on your back for being one of the 99.9% that appreciates innovation and improved UX).
Don’t get me wrong, I still personally geek out to performing raw wallet functions through the command line, but I also do recognize the business need in creating those metaphorical “Easy” buttons. Any wallet that proclaims to be a pure open-source, altruistic, privacy focused tool is a public good and cannot have a sustainable business model.
Ledger is an absolute juggernaut. I’ll admit it’s really hard to compete against Ledger. Despite their hiccups and flaws, they still dominate the hardware wallet space by miles. And it clearly shows in almost every business aspect of theirs. They’re everywhere, literally. They’re on the necks of celebrities. They’re in stylized kiosks at Best Buys. They’re the actual cold storage wallet used by most institutional custodians. They’re in the sponsorship shoutouts of your favorite crypto podcast. Their social media game is on par with the likes of Nike or Apple. Did I mention they’re everywhere?
It’s become ubiquitous for one to recommend a Ledger. Even the most publicized diehard bitcoiners are pushing Ledger sponsorships. Ledger goes against what most private key extremists would deem viable but even they would be content with a Ledger. You cannot overstate the first mover advantage and marketing prowess Ledger has accumulated in their moat. Even Trezor, which has a better track record of PR, is pitted against Ledger sometimes.
So from the eyes of a wallet competitor, Ledger is both hated and loved. Most wallet teams, including Ballet, would fall victim to eyeing what tricks Ledger has up its sleeves. It was common practice to mimic the ways they rolled out communications, marketing announcements, sales promotions, and etc. And at the same time, ungratefully bash them any chance we had.
Ledger is the Apple of hardware wallets. And in this era, they’re almost impossible to beat. Just to put this into a better context, crypto influencers don’t need to be asked by Ledger to create a Ledger review video. They just do it.
Take care of your loyalists. In an industry where new trends and tech seem to pop up on a daily basis, properly treating your existing community base can’t be stressed enough. Ballet has a strong following of loyalists. A diehard group of loyalists that valued cold storage self-custody in the same way with their right to bear arms. To them, self-custody meant freedom and it was a virtue we leveraged. The high switching costs prevalent in the wallet business was a double edge sword: easy to keep your users but hard to attain new ones. Moving one’s core digital assets from one wallet to another is rarely a monthly task. How often does one switch banks? Rewarding current users and seeking complete beginners were paramount to growing the community. With the latter heavily benefiting from direct educational endeavors that Ballet organized.
Lastly, the biggest general takeaway I learned is that most crypto users don’t care about HOW their wallet is secure. A wallet’s absolute raw security is antithetical to its popularity. Users adopt the wallet they use either because it was suggested online by some blog or influencer OR they were given their first crypto via that wallet. I could probably run a poll and ask crypto users why they use their current wallet. The least chosen answer would probably be “because I researched the open-source codebase of the wallet”.
Word of mouth and successful marketing are keys to a wallet’s popularity. Providing security and excellent UI/UX are basic fundamentals. Winning over key influencers is core and the biggest hurdle for any wallet team. And it takes a lot more than hefty sponsorship money to attain this.