The funnel is the product.
The flow started as two pages of text
2024. A Notion doc with two pages of solid text. A staking flow with more branching logic than anyone expected. 40% less users bailing halfway through. The UI took a day and a half. Everything else took weeks.
How it got to us
BlastUP had designers. Working product, live economy, everything functional. But the co-founder knew us, and specifically knew that the kind of problem he had — structurally complex, full of technical constraints that create UX dead ends — was the thing we’re unreasonably good at.
The danger lived between screens
The part that was actually hard
Normally we don’t need three weeks to think about UX on a crypto product. We’ve shipped enough of them that we could spec an NFT marketplace flow at three in the morning if someone shook us awake. The UX on most of these things is, frankly, trivial — the visual layer is where the actual craft lives.
BlastUP was the inverse, and that’s what makes it worth telling. The visual layer came together in about a day and a half. The flow logic — the invisible part — took weeks, and it took weeks because every path through the system branched into states we hadn’t anticipated, and every state we missed was a user hitting a wall with money already committed.
Marie and I started by building something that looked, and I want to be precise here, like garbage. There were pieces from Kibra in it, pieces from NearWallet, chunks of Untitled UI from a kit we’d bought, elements from the Münzen widget — visually, a complete Frankenstein. But the structure underneath worked. Marie went through every screen sticking in comments — not design annotations, more like dispatches: here’s what this element does, here’s why it’s here, here’s what breaks if you remove it. We showed this beautiful disaster to the client, they approved the logic, and only then did we start making it look like something.
Make learning part of the action
Stealing from ourselves
There’s a curly little arrow — decorative, does a little loop before pointing at something — that was first drawn by Vlad Pochukalin, the founder of a studio I used to work at. I liked it, used it in another project, then another, and it’s been migrating from file to file for four years now. It’s not that I’m copying an arrow. It’s that every project deposits things into a shared library — patterns, components, micro-decisions — and over time that library becomes the reason we work fast, because half the thinking on any new project has already been done somewhere else.
For BlastUP, the deposit that mattered was from EZ Wallet. Denchik — one of our guys — had built an onboarding architecture for it that was, and I don’t say this about many things, genuinely brilliant. Left side of the screen: dynamic contextual guidance that changes with every step. Right side: the actual actions. The user is never sat down and taught. They’re doing things and being guided simultaneously, and the seam between learning and doing doesn’t exist. We didn’t copy the screens. We took the idea that onboarding and participation should be the same thing, and rebuilt it from scratch for a completely different product.
Write the invisible flow first
The real work was writing down every piece of information that could appear on every screen in every state, then removing what did not help. The flow branched into states we had not anticipated, and every missed state could become a user hitting a wall with money already committed.
The staking card starts empty with a single action. Press it to see the pools and rewards unfold from that one step.
Keep the next tap in reach
Five clicks to irreversibility
The thing that cut drop-off by 40% is hard to point at, because it’s not a feature — it’s a structural choice about where one thing ends and another begins. Or rather, the choice to not have that boundary at all.
Step four looks like onboarding. Same layout, same pacing, same position for the button. It is not onboarding. You are now technically in the IDO participation flow. Step five: “Connect wallet” appears in the exact spot your thumb has been tapping for four screens.
The modal that keeps its mouth shut
After you connect your wallet, you choose how to pay — fiat or crypto. This shows up as a modal overlay, not a full page. This was a very deliberate, very small decision that I still think about.
A full page communicates weight. It says: here is a significant decision, please pause. A modal communicates utility — quick thing, pick one, move on. At this point the user has already connected their wallet and tapped through four screens of forward motion. The last thing you want is a layout that whispers “maybe stop and think about whether you really want to do this.”
The tier upsell operates on the same principle. On every relevant screen: what your current tier gets you, what the next tier would get you, and exactly how much more you’d need — calculated live from your existing staked balance, converted to fiat via API, shown right there in context. Not a popup. Not an interruption. Information that belongs where the user is already looking, arriving at the moment they’re already thinking about it.
The gas fee step — technically forced, a constraint we couldn’t remove — became part of the same rhythm. Pre-warning on the screen before. The gas screen itself explains what you’re paying for. Everything presented as context for the step you’re on, never as a pitch for a step you haven’t chosen.
Same spotLet's go, Great, Got it, then Connect wallet. Same place, same size; the thumb already knows where to go.
Gas warningThe chain forces a separate fee. We announce it a screen early, so it arrives as a step, not a surprise.
The standard flow, where most people leave after the tutorial, next to the shipped one, where onboarding runs straight into the real flow.
40% less drop-off
The cyberpunk glow and volumetric tier cards, the shadows that make them feel like physical objects you’re picking up rather than flat images you’re selecting, the payment operator logo embedded directly in the action button so you know who’s processing your money before you tap — all of this is real craft, and all of it affects conversion. In crypto, visual confidence is spending confidence.
But it was a day and a half of work on top of weeks of structural thinking, and I think that ratio — not the screens themselves — is the thing worth remembering about this project. The product that shipped looks clean and professional and glowy. The product that actually works, the one that reduced drop-off by 40%, is invisible. It’s the architecture underneath — which screen comes when, what information lives where, which moment feels like a pause and which feels like momentum, and the precise point at which onboarding stops being onboarding and starts being the thing itself, which is a point that, if we did our job right, nobody can find.
Blue, what do you notice about Amro?→Find a case for my product→What does Ivan believe about design?→Where does Ivan write?→