At the Cardano Summit 2025 in Berlin, I attended a lunch-and-learn session hosted by Gero Wallet that filled in a lot of missing context about this long-running Cardano project. Out on the Summit expo floor, many of us had seen Gero’s huge announcement of one of Cardano’s first crypto payment cards. This session wasn’t about promoting that card. Instead, current CEO Adam Cazes explained how the current team got there, and why today’s Gero is not the same project many in the community remember.
Gero was a Wallet - but a different team
One of the most important clarifications came early. Gero Wallet itself dates back to 2021 and was originally built by a different team. The current leadership did not build the wallet, nor did they originate its earliest design decisions.
“It’s not a company that we founded,” Adam Cazes explained. “There was a wallet called Gero Wallet a very long time ago.” We must note that the definition of “very long time” is unique in crypto space, but we’ll take his point. The distinction matters, because much of the community’s perception of Gero is anchored in an earlier iteration - before its architecture, priorities, and ownership changed. The story of how that change happened begins somewhere else entirely.
A Separate Path: Music, NFTs, and Building Tools
Before getting involved with Gero, Adam and his co-founder David were on their own blockchain journey. The first chapter of that story is rooted in music, not money. Adam, a longtime musician, initially approached crypto with skepticism. NFTs, especially, struck him as strange.
“I thought it was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard of. Why would anyone buy pictures on the internet?” Curiosity eventually won out. The team began experimenting with music NFTs on Cardano, recording original sounds and building generative “music boxes” that could be minted on-chain. Importantly, they didn’t just create content. They built infrastructure, including a self-service minting tool designed to onboard musicians into blockchain publishing. The project was ambitious and educational. It also arrived in a market that shifted sharply beneath it. Timing, macro conditions, and adoption realities all played a role in how it played out. “We spent hundreds of hours on this,” Adam said. “And then the market spoke.” What didn’t pan out financially still proved formative. The experience forced the team to learn Cardano: its tooling, its constraints, and its strengths. Critically, they also had to confront what it actually takes to build usable products in this ecosystem. “Fortunately, it didn’t work out,” Adam reflected. “Because it taught us so much about the blockchain. What we’re doing today is probably what we were supposed to be working on.”
Where the Paths Crossed: A Bug and a Grant
That learning soon intersected with the original Gero wallet in an unexpected way. While integrating their music minting service with different wallets, Adam and David discovered a bug in Gero Wallet. They reached out, and a relationship formed. Later, Gero (the original team) won Catalyst funding for a security project called Cardano Shield. But they realized they lacked the manpower to deliver it. Remembering the earlier collaboration, the team brought David in to help, and Adam joined as well. The results were decisive.
“They put twelve months on the timeline,” Adam said. “We finished it in two.” Cardano Shield shipped, open-source and reusable by other wallets across the ecosystem. Trust was built - not through marketing, but through execution.
From Contributors to Owners
As Adam and David became more involved with Gero, differences surfaced. The ambitions they had for what the wallet could be didn’t always align with the existing team’s priorities. Eventually, a clean break emerged as the best solution.
“Our ambitions didn’t align,” Adam said. “So eventually, they offered us to buy the wallet.” About eighteen months ago, Adam and David acquired the Gero Wallet IP and took full ownership. From that point on, “old Gero” effectively ended. “We completely rebuilt the wallet from the ground up.” That rebuild included hard choices. The mobile version was scrapped. Architecture was rethought. The goal shifted from “wallet as connector” to “wallet as platform.”
A Practical Problem Becomes a Product
The idea for the Gero Card didn’t start as a roadmap feature. It started as a business problem. The team was earning ada. The world, however, runs on fiat. Paying for flights, infrastructure, and everyday business expenses meant navigating exchanges, approvals, fees, and banks that often refused crypto-sourced funds entirely.
“We were getting paid in ada, but we needed fiat to run the business.” At one point, the solution was half a joke. “Let’s just build our own credit card,” Adam recalled. “That would solve everything.” Eventually, it did.
“The Most Non-Custodial Way to Pay With Crypto”
The resulting card reflects the team’s hard-won priorities. It lives entirely inside the Gero wallet. Users don’t hop between apps. On-chain actions still exist, but they’re not forced into the foreground.
“This is the most non-custodial way to pay with crypto in the real world,” Adam said. The design philosophy is pragmatic. Security matters, but so does convenience. “Users don’t care about UTXOs,” he added. “They care about convenience.”
Beyond the Card
The card is only one piece of a broader vision. Gero is positioning itself as a unified platform: staking, governance, swaps, perpetuals, cashback for shopping, even a built-in media player that nods back to the team’s musical roots.
“We don’t want to replace Web2,” Adam said. “We want to merge it.” Mobile support, Apple and Google Pay integration, credit-style flows, and multi-chain expansion are all on the roadmap. The through-line is consistent: reduce friction without abandoning self-custody.
Why This History Matters
Understanding this history changes how Gero’s recent announcements land. The Gero Card isn’t a marketing bolt-on or a late attempt to follow a trend. It’s the outcome of new ownership, a full rebuild, and years of lived experience trying, and struggling, to operate as a Cardano-native business. In that light, the card feels less like a launch and more like a conclusion to a long, winding arc. Or, as Adam put it more simply:
“We built this because we needed it.”
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