What We Learned in Five Years at Ledger

Are you building products, or just maintaining plumbing? It's a question that haunts every crypto product leader, but most don't realize how deep the trap goes until it's too late. After five years of blockchain integrations at Ledger, I can tell you exactly when that realization hit me—and why it led us to build Adamik.
— Fabrice (CEO at Adamik)

The Real Cost of Blockchain Integration

After leading blockchain integrations at Ledger for five years (first as Head of Blockchain Integration, then as Head of Platform & Developer Ecosystem), I came to a realization I couldn’t unsee.

With every new crypto integration, my team was reinventing the wheel. And so was every other team in the industry I spoke with.

I still remember integrating Tezos and its staking feature: 10 months, 5 engineers, and endless coordination with a foundation that changed their documentation mid-flight. That was just how it worked. We'd learned to accept it.

But at some point, I started asking: are we building products, or are we maintaining plumbing?

What Are We Really Doing as an Industry?

In 2023, I was in a product meeting that made everything click.

We had to choose: delay our highly anticipated portfolio revamp by six months, or pause work on integrating two Layer 1s that users were asking for.

The room went silent.

We weren't debating product strategy anymore. We were forced to choose between building the future and maintaining the pipes. That's when I realized how far we'd drifted from our mission, and from what made me excited about the crypto industry in the first place.

At Ledger, our mission was to deliver unmatched security and simplicity to end-users. Supporting blockchains was part of that, but it was never the end goal. Blockchains were the fuel our product needed to stay compelling—the necessary foundation that made Ledger hardware and software relevant in a multi-chain world.

And yet, like many others in the space, we found ourselves spending more and more time on integrations, and less time on user impact and industry growth.

The Integration Trap

Most teams still underestimate the cost.

One new chain isn't one more feature. It's a system-wide tax.

Integration debt snowballs like tech debt, but with extra weight:

• External dependencies you don't control

• Docs that shift weekly and make you pull your hair out

• Protocols that fork overnight, sometimes without warning

• Product managers forced to become protocol experts, spending weeks learning blockchain intricacies instead of focusing on user needs

When we first integrated Polkadot in Ledger Live, it was supposed to be an innovative yet easy new network to support. But after a while, it became obvious that the frequent runtime upgrades would force us to release new versions of Ledger Live every time. Not to add features, or improve anything, but just to keep it working. This was a complete oversight, a systemic blind spot where we didn't anticipate the amount of maintenance. Our release process just wasn't adapted to this protocol. We paid the price for it during a year until a better solution could eventually be found.

It's not just an engineering challenge. It's an organizational trap.

And more than that, it's an industry-wide bottleneck.

The Real Cost of Splitting Focus

This is what keeps me up at night: entire teams are optimizing for blockchain craft instead of product impact. That's how industry leaders become legacy players.

Ledger is an incredible company that's done more than most to move crypto forward—and will continue to. But like any large player, blind spots get harder to catch as you scale. The winners of today can still miss the windows of tomorrow.

We've seen this before:

• BlackBerry doubled down on keyboards. Apple reimagined the interface.

• Yahoo optimized directories. Google rewired access.

• Blockbuster expanded stores. Netflix shifted the medium, and closed Blockbusters.

The pattern's always the same: Those who over-commit to internal plumbing miss the windows that matter for the user experience.

When blockchain integration becomes the product, the costs multiply:

• The best engineers are pulled off core innovation

• Innovation cycles slow down to turtle speed

• Teams burn out maintaining what users will never see

In our quarterly business review, our CEO asked why user engagement was flat despite adding 12 new chains. The uncomfortable truth: users wanted to trade and swap these assets, not just hold them and see them in their portfolio. But we'd burned all our engineering bandwidth on integrations, leaving us with a half-baked swap feature buried three clicks deep. We were winning the integration game but losing the product war.

It's also how crypto bloats from within. We say we're building for users, but many teams are really building for internal prestige. Complexity becomes the product.

So We Built Adamik

After five years of watching brilliant engineers become protocol janitors, I couldn't ignore it anymore. The industry needed an escape hatch.

That's what led us to build Adamik.

Think of it as the abstraction layer crypto never had. One API that handles the blockchain complexity so your team can focus on the user experience. Read, write, and stake across 60+ chains without learning each protocol's quirks, without maintaining 47 different SDKs, without your PM becoming a Cosmos and Hedera expert.

Blockchain integration is complex, painful, and never truly finished. Which is exactly why your team shouldn't be doing it.

This isn't about convenience. It's about leverage.

Crypto moves fast. Adoption windows open and close in quarters, not years. While your competitors are still debugging gas estimation on TON, you're already shipping the features that actually matter to users.

Zoom Out: This Isn't Just About Cost

Crypto wasn't built to recreate the banking system's technical stack. It was built to transcend it with transparency, composability, and open infrastructure that anyone can build on.

We don't win by building overly complex products. We win by building experiences that traditional finance can't even imagine.

The smartest engineers in the space didn't get into crypto to debug RPCs and wrangle APIs. They came to build the future of value exchange, ownership, and coordination.

Meanwhile, crypto adoption has nearly doubled since 2021. We need to serve these people with modern product experiences that supercharge this momentum.

But right now, the best minds in crypto are spending 80% of their time maintaining code users will never see.

Is that the legacy we want to leave?

We don't need more integration heroes. We need product visionaries.

Abstraction is a mark of maturity, not laziness.

Mass adoption won't come from mastering complexity. It'll come from making that complexity disappear.

The smartest engineers in the space didn't get into crypto to debug RPCs and wrangle APIs. They came to build the future of value exchange, ownership, and coordination.

So Ask Yourself This:

• Are you optimizing for integration mastery, or user value?

• Are you building the next layer of crypto adoption, or just wiring pipes?

• Are you spending your best cycles on what differentiates you, or what slows everyone down?

The crypto industry doesn't need more integration heroes.

Adamik exists so you don't have to keep choosing between innovation and maintenance.

So you can stop building pipes, and start building the future.

👉 Ready to focus on what matters? adamik.io