Year
2025
Client
Open Wallet
Category
Crypto Wallet · Product Design
Product Duration
1 year
The brief said "design prediction markets." We delivered a fourteen-platform competitive analysis, a nineteen-section product specification, thirteen flow diagrams, a working React prototype, and six promo video concepts. Nobody asked for any of that except the screens.
This is the pattern across a year with Open Wallet. A design team that only does what's requested is a production line. A design team that understands the product deeply enough to know what it actually needs is a design function.
Mitul Manish — co-founder, CPTO — had a strong engineering team and no internal design capacity. We got to him through cold outreach, replacing a team he wasn't happy with. First sprint: five to seven screens for a debit card flow, two weeks. By September, the previous team was gone entirely and we were the only design function Open Wallet had.
The prediction markets work is the clearest example. Mitul was explicit: this cannot feel like a betting platform. So before drawing a single screen, I studied fourteen platforms — not a screenshot gallery, but a strategic analysis of how each one handles the gap between "trading" and "gambling" in their UI language.
The core decision: price equals probability. A contract at $0.65 means 65% chance — you're buying a position, not placing a bet. Neutral palette. Green and red reserved exclusively for profit and loss. The lending research went deeper still — forty-plus products, the central problem being that simplifying too much gets users liquidated, while overcomplicating kills adoption. We replaced loan-to-value ratio with a color-coded health indicator and a liquidation price in dollars. Nobody asked for any of this framing. It's just what the feature needed.
Two weeks in, before the first sprint was even over, I wrote Mitul about something outside the scope — the product's visual identity. Open Wallet looked close enough to Trust Wallet that you could swap logos and it would take a while to notice. I proposed 3D. Mitul said he'd never loved the current illustrations either. The second sprint already included the new direction.
Then he asked us to update the website. "Continue with website for the moment" — that was the brief. What came back was a visual identity for the entire product. The concept started from the philosophy of Frutiger Aero, not the aesthetic: technology should feel like clear sky, like something built for people with grocery lists and Tuesday mornings. Blue sky as the visual anchor. Real people — AI-generated at photographic quality, retouched to studio standards — surrounded by floating interface fragments showing features in context. Usage scenarios instead of feature lists, because the point of a financial product isn't what buttons it has, it's what you can do with your afternoon because those buttons exist.
Mitul wanted a version without the people. I argued that removing them would hollow out the concept. We built both, shipped both to Framer, let him compare live. A user sent criticism of the direction. I told Mitul straight: user interviews are 99% noise. Bounce rates, conversions, deposits — that's the data. The site shipped. The visual language migrated into the app, promo videos, partner decks, app store screenshots. A "update the website" brief became the brand.
You catch a gasless counter reading "0/5" and realize users think it means "zero out of five used" when it means "zero remaining." This only surfaces in production. You only notice because you're watching the product after handoff.
You design a CEX swap that's deliberately plain — revenue-first, no flourish — because the client said "simplicity over beauty" and he's right here. Then you design a debit card onboarding with a 3D card assembling itself on screen and haptic feedback on the final reveal, because here he wants magic. Knowing which context demands which approach isn't a methodology. It's familiarity.
You tell the client his idea of putting Receive as a navigation tab is a bad one — that the slot should open new value, not duplicate existing function. He agrees. This kind of pushback is only possible when you've earned it by being right often enough.
Ninety-three tasks across a year. Some were a meme with Patrick from SpongeBob. One was a nineteen-section product specification. The range is the point — when you're the design function of a product, nothing is beneath you and nothing is above you. The model is called a retainer, but the mechanics aren't the thing. The thing is treating someone else's product as if your name were on it. Open Wallet went from a wallet that looked like Trust Wallet to a financial product with a face of its own — not in a single sprint, but through accumulation. It wasn't ours. But that's the whole point.
Marie owns the design system and leads production — when I set direction and move to the next problem, she builds what ships. Alice runs the organizational layer: scopes, invoices, timelines, client communication. The three of us handled about ninety percent of everything across the year. The only time we brought in extra hands was for a large-volume cleanup of legacy components — routine work that predated us.
If something isn't working, we go back and redo it without being asked. It doesn't happen often, because the level of immersion means we usually get it right the first time. But the willingness to catch your own errors and not protect a decision just because it's already been approved — that's part of why the trust exists. Mitul shares things in our work chat that clients don't normally share with external teams. That transparency wasn't negotiated. It happened because the relationship stopped being transactional around month two and never went back.
