Careers in blockchain (you don't have to code)
"Do I need to be a developer?" Adi's answer is a flat no. His own company runs on designers, writers, underwriters, and logistics people.
What's going on
The most common question in the whole series was some version of "I can't code - is there a place for me here?" Adi Kurniadi's answer was an unambiguous no, you don't need to be a developer. His own company, Pada Digital, runs on roles most people never associate with blockchain: design, media and social, writing, operations, insurance and underwriting, logistics. The technology is the spine; a real business needs every other discipline around it.
His broader thesis was a bet on timing. He traced the wave of the world's most valuable companies - oil, then web companies, then app companies, then AI - and put blockchain as the next decade's wave. His one-sentence advice to an 18-year-old: "By 2030, everything will be blockchain. Everything." The preparation window is now.
But his real lesson was about how to build. Don't chase your own profit first - make others prosper, and they become your strength. Don't hoard; share. That, he argued, is literally what distributed ledger technology means, lived out as a way of working. And start by building prototypes that prove a real solution, not pitches that promise a big return.
Pada Digital needed insurance experts to underwrite crop NFTs, logistics people to move real food, writers to explain it to farmers, and designers to make it usable - long before any of that touched a line of smart-contract code. The on-ramp into this industry is wider than people think.
Key terms
- Non-technical roles
- Design, ops, writing, underwriting, logistics - the majority of jobs in a blockchain company.
- Prototype-first
- Prove a real solution with a working prototype before promising returns.
- Problem over profit
- Adi's principle: solve a real problem and the value follows; chase profit alone and you build nothing.