Text Crypto & NFTs Prototype For Blockchain Social Platform

End-to-end crypto transfer via direct messages in the Calaxy app, illustrating confirmation, delivery, and transaction details for a USDC payment sent through chat.

PROJECT TYPE:

Prototype

CLIENT:

Calaxy

LOCATION:

Los Angeles

DELIVERABLES:

Figma, Protopie

STACK:

Figma, Protopie

Design Challenge

Blockchain technology is a double edged sword. At the same time it wields the potential to unlock incredible benefits to society in the areas of trust, privacy, cost savings, and the preservation of individual freedom and liberty — it introduces a vast expanse of usability challenges. In this way, blockchain is frontier domain in much the same way that AI is. There is an entirely new set of interaction paradigms that need to be invented to make blockchain usable by everyday people. The early and late majority stages of crypto's adoption curve won't happen until the technology is just as usable as everyday apps currently our phones.

To be more specific, if left unattended, blockchain will introduce enormous user friction across almost every facet of a web3 user experience. When it comes to transferring value peer to peer onchain for example, you need to copy/paste wallet addresses, pay gas fees in native network tokens, and on some chains, complete a token association with the wallet you are transacting with, before you can send or receive crypto.

This friction is all part of what enables the decentralized, permissionless operations of a blockchain. But its an absolute nightmare to deal with on a regular basis.

Design Solution

Anytime I am designing a crypto native-user journey, I always try and borrow from well established web2 design patterns. My goal is to preserve familiarity without hindering access to the magic of blockchain. I essentially want to manifest a product experience that feels familiar on the surface, while being completely revolutionary under the hood.

"Texting crypto and NFTs" might seem like an obvious choice as an normie alternative to the early wallet-to-wallet design patterns that have taken hold with crypto natives — but the technical hurdles that needed to be overcome to accomplish this were considerable.

Before we get to the technical constraints, let's first take a look at the finished user journey. The video below is an interview with the Calaxy Co-founders Solo Ceesay and Spencer Dinwiddie debuting this texting feature live on CNBC.

There are 3 primary points of technical friction that I was able to obfuscate away with this text-based design pattern:

No more copy/pasting wallet addresses: When you are texting with another user on the platform, we already know the built-in wallet that is associated with that user account, and we know yours. So we don't need you to specify the wallet address when sending crypto or NFTs via Calaxy Messenger.
No more gas fees: Unless we're talking about Bitcoin or Ethereum, most leading chains have what we consider to be a "nominal" gas fee — meaning at the unit economic level, its more worth it for us to sponsor gas and allow users to transfer self-custody assets between each seamlessly, than pass along the gas fee and introduce friction that could prevent users from transacting all together.

No more manual token associations: Some blockchains like Hedera Hashgraph first require that the receiving wallet of an asset be "associated" with the token it is receiving before it will accept the incoming transfer from that token. This is a separate transaction that needs to be accomplished ahead of time, which represent significant friction. We designed a prompt box inside the text chat of the recipient that allows them to "accept the transfer" if the token being sent it new to their wallet. Simply tapping "accept" prompts the Calaxy platform to conduct the token association under the hood. The token transfer happens first, then the incoming asset transfer triggers all in a matter of seconds.