5 Years Designing
Blockchain & Crypto
Products

Five years at 4Soft during the crypto boom meant working across a range of blockchain projects — some with real products behind them, some pitched as proofs of concept to attract investment. The projects were varied: a Chrome extension hot wallet, a compliance-heavy ICO platform, and a supply chain traceability PoC for the meat industry. Three very different products, one common thread — designing trust into systems where users have every reason to be skeptical.

The 2018–2019 ICO boom was a strange time to be a designer. Many platforms were burning through investor money at speed, with business models that — in hindsight — were more about raising capital than solving real problems. As a designer you rarely see the full picture. You get a brief, you design, you ship. Sometimes the product disappears quietly.

What the industry lacked in stability it made up for in genuine design challenges. Users were skeptical by default. Compliance requirements were brutal. And the technology itself was invisible — you had to make people trust something they couldn't see or touch.

My first crypto project — a hot wallet Chrome extension for transferring and exchanging cryptocurrency. Think early MetaMask: balance overview, send to address, pick currency, choose how much gas you want to spend and how fast you want the transaction to go.

Simple on paper, but the UX of gas fees is genuinely hard. You're asking a non-technical user to make a financial decision based on network congestion they can't see. The design had to make that tradeoff legible — fast and expensive vs slow and cheap — without overwhelming them.

An ICO platform for IVY cryptocurrency — designed to carry more compliance data per transaction than any traditional payment method. Where SWIFT moves 10 data points and Bitcoin moves 1, IVY baked in 74+ KYC and 120+ KYT fields into every transfer.

I was brought in to redesign the platform from lo-fi mockups, iterating directly with the client throughout. The core design challenge: compliance flows are inherently painful. Making 74 required fields feel like onboarding rather than interrogation was most of the job.

A PoC for a Swiss client building technology to comply with animal welfare laws and meat selling regulations. The end user wasn't a farmer or inspector — it was a regular person at a supermarket, scanning a product to trace its exact journey: from the farm, through the processing plant, to the shelf they were standing in front of.

The core design challenge was information architecture: a single animal could be divided into dozens of separate cuts, each becoming its own traceable unit on the blockchain — with its own record, its own journey. Figuring out how to structure that hierarchy, and how to surface it cleanly for a consumer who just wants to know if their steak came from a well-treated cow — that was most of the thinking.

The product never went into production. My job was to gather requirements, produce mockups clear enough to communicate the concept, and help build the whitepaper and presentation the client needed to find investors. Designing for a pitch is a different discipline — you're selling the idea, not the interface.

With time, I came to think the real value of blockchain was never the currency — it was the licensing and provenance layer. You can mark anything: artwork, meat, ammunition. Anyone in the chain can verify where something came from and who handled it.

ArtClear was the only project where that idea was actually the whole point — no tokens, no speculation, just proof of origin backed by HP fingerprinting technology. It's also the only NFT-adjacent project I've worked on, and the one that proved the concept works.

The projects that aged well weren't about trading — they were about provenance. Knowing where something came from. That idea is still the most interesting thing blockchain can do.