Let me guess: you’re a crypto PM who “doesn’t need to know the tech in detail” because “that’s what engineers are for.”
Yeah. That was me too. Until my roadmap met reality. 😅
“Just Add a Wallet” – Famous Last Words
Naive me, a year ago:
Let’s just add a built-in wallet. It’s basic stuff — send, receive, swap. Two sprints max.
Then came:
- endless calls about key management and custody models
- arguments about self-custody vs custodial flows
- fun new words like HSM, MPC, KMS, SLAs, audits, incident response, chain support…
At some point, one of the devs quietly dropped:
“What you’re describing is basically a Wallet-as-a-Service integration. Or a new department.”
That’s when it hit me: I was planning features for something I fundamentally didn’t understand.
What PMs Think WaaS Is vs What It Actually Is 🧩
I used to think WaaS = “an API that creates wallets.”
In reality, WaaS = an entire infrastructure layer you’re outsourcing:
- key generation & storage 🔐
- signing transactions
- chain abstraction (hello, multi-chain hell)
- compliance & monitoring
- uptime, scaling, and all the “it’s 3 AM and something broke” stuff
As a PM, if you don’t get this, you can’t:
- estimate anything realistically
- prioritize tech debt vs features
- negotiate scope with your team or vendor
- explain to stakeholders why “just add this chain” is not a Tuesday task
Where WhiteBIT WaaS Finally Clicked for Me ⚙️
The “aha” moment happened when I started looking at real products, not just pretty marketing pages. One of the cases was WhiteBIT WaaS.
Here’s what became obvious in practice:
- WaaS gives you a ready-made backend for wallet operations - you work with APIs, not raw keys.
- Questions like “how do we store keys, scale infra, and monitor transactions” are partially handled for you - you focus on the product, not on building a crypto data center in hell.
- Instead of spending months building your own wallet infrastructure, you can launch prototypes and test hypotheses much faster ⚡️
And this is where the PM role suddenly shifts: you’re no longer just drawing features, you’re making decisions about:
- which flows are delegated to the WaaS layer
- what stays in your own business logic
- how UX should look if there’s a third-party provider under the hood
So What Should a Crypto PM Actually Know? 📋
No, you don’t need to write the SDK. But you do need a basic grasp of:
- custody models (self-custody vs custodial, shared vs individual wallets)
- what a typical WaaS flow looks like: user → app → backend → WaaS → blockchain
- what guarantees the provider gives: uptime, security, logging, limits
- where the provider’s responsibility ends and yours begins
This isn’t “extra tech knowledge for the CV.” It’s the difference between:
“We missed the deadline because it turned out to be more complex.”
and“Here’s the justified scope, risk profile, and a realistic release plan.”
The Hard Lesson
I didn’t learn this from a book. I learned it from a failed release, an angry tech lead, and a roadmap we had to rewrite from scratch.
If you’re a PM in crypto and still treat Wallet-as-a-Service as “implementation detail,” you’re voluntarily playing on hard mode.
Learn the infra, look at real products like WhiteBIT WaaS, talk to devs in their language - and your features will finally stop being fantasy on a kanban board and actually ship to production 🚀
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