Most crypto holders never spend their crypto, largely because doing so is inconvenient. For a fintech startup preparing for a Nasdaq listing, name withheld until then, I designed a wallet, card, and payments app intended to make spending crypto as simple as using a regular debit card.
Overview
This is a client project for a fintech startup building three products at once: a crypto wallet, international remittance, and merchant payments, tied together by a debit card and a rewards program. The company has asked not to be named here, ahead of a planned Nasdaq listing, so this case study describes the product without identifying the business.
The founder brought me in to design the customer experience around a simple belief: crypto adoption isn't limited by the technology, it's limited by how inconvenient crypto is to spend day to day, so most people just hold it instead. His brief, almost word for word: users “don't have to really worry whether it is crypto or fiat.”
The goal wasn't to make crypto easier to understand. It was to make the underlying technology disappear, behind a card that taps like any other.
Crypto is easy to buy and painful to spend. That gap, not the technology, is where adoption stalls.
Competitor teardown, three personas and journey maps, full IA and flows, a design system, and hi-fi dashboards for both consumer and merchant.
Delivered to the founder, who responded positively and is considering the direction for future builds. Hi-fi build in progress.
The problem
Buying crypto takes about ninety seconds. Spending it requires converting to cash, waiting for it to settle, and paying a fee before making a purchase. Each extra step gives people a reason to use a credit card instead.
The typical industry response is to close that gap with education: explainers, tutorials, glossaries. This founder took the opposite approach: stop explaining the technology and hide it instead.
“We cannot go on educating everybody. But if you say that we are going to give you a card, then it's much easier, because [everybody is already using] a card.”
From an early call on the concept
Research
Designing for a single generic “crypto user” would have failed all three products at once, so I built one persona per product. Each has needs the other two don't share.
27, software engineer
“I've had crypto for three years and never spent a dollar of it. I have some idea of how to, but it's always been too much effort.”
Needs: a card she can tap anywhere without thinking about the crypto side, and rewards that beat what she already gets.
34, healthcare professional
“I've built a stable life here and manage my finances well. The one thing I can't fix is how much disappears every time I send money home.”
Needs: honest exchange rates, predictable arrival times, and an app simple enough for his family abroad to actually use.
42, restaurant owner
“I want to accept crypto, I just don't have time to figure it all out.”
Needs: Square level simplicity, lower fees than card processors, and protection from volatility hitting his revenue.
The insight
Following Sydney through Crypto.com, the largest competitor in the category, her journey broke down at one specific point: the rewards system. She wanted to spend crypto and hit a paywall instead.
“1.5% is worse than my regular credit card, why would I bother switching? I have to buy a completely different token and lock it up to get rewards?”
Sydney's journey map, evaluation stage
This is the core opportunity. The incumbent asks users to invest before rewarding them. This product reverses that order.
Principles
The founder gave two instructions that pull in different directions: he wanted the rewards system to feel like a game, but also didn't want anyone to feel overwhelmed. Balancing both became the core design problem.
No wallet addresses, gas fees, or jargon appear on any primary screen. Balances lead in dollars. The app should read as a premium banking product that happens to run on crypto, closer to Revolut than to a trading platform.
Progress has to be visible and specific: not a vague percentage, but “28,713 points away from Silver,” an exact, reachable number. The reward is gamified, never the money itself.
Every fee and arrival time appears on screen before the user commits, not after. In a category people already distrust, transparency is the feature. Hiding the crypto can never mean hiding the price.
The work
The consumer home screen is where the core thesis had to hold up. Every crypto instinct pushes toward charts and tickers, but Sydney just wants to know what she has, what she spent, and what she earned.
1
2
3
4
5
Onboarding asks whether you're here to spend or to get paid, and that answer sets your default home. The toggle stays, so a shop owner who is also a customer never needs a second account.
The largest number on the screen is a dollar figure, not a token count or portfolio allocation. This single decision reflects the core thesis: if the first thing a user reads is crypto, the app has already failed.
Add, Send, Receive, Exchange. Anything a person actually does with money is one tap from open, which is the standard set by the banking apps people already trust, not by exchanges.
The card shows how far she is from the next tier as a real figure she can act on, rather than a percentage. Specificity is what makes the next milestone feel reachable instead of abstract, and it's where the gamification lives without shouting.
Most transfers go to the same few people. Recent recipients sit on the home screen with an amount field, so the common case never becomes a flow.
The work
Daniel doesn't have a portfolio. He has a restaurant. His home screen answers one question, which is how much came in and when it lands in the bank.
1
2
3
4
The hero number is today's takings. Same layout as the consumer view, completely different meaning, which keeps one design system serving two mental models.
Accept Payment is the largest tappable thing on the screen. Daniel's benchmark isn't a crypto app, it's Square, so taking a payment has to be one tap from open.
Pending, In Transit, and Settled, each with an amount and an ETA. His deepest fear about crypto is money going somewhere he can't see, so the fix is to never make him ask.
A running total of what he saved on processing fees versus the card networks. His pain is margins, so the app quietly reminds him it's fixing exactly that.
The flows
The home screens set the visual direction. The rest of the product was deliberately worked out in wireframes, so structure and sequence could be settled before visual design.
These are the flows as they stand today. They're mid fidelity on purpose, and they're being taken to hi-fi for the client now.
What's next
This hasn't launched, so the usual proof isn't available yet. Three things would move it forward.