Designing fintech infrastructure meant to run forever

I joined PoolTogether Inc. in November 2022 as their sole designer. The organization was going through rapid change, working to build a fully decentralized, permissionless version of the PoolTogether protocol.

What is PoolTogether? The initial product was simple –users deposit crypto assets into PoolTogether vaults for a chance to win prizes. Deposits earn yield (originally via lending on Aave), yield funds prizes and users can withdraw their full deposit at any time. But as the protocol has matured, the tool itself has become more abstract, transitioning into a piece of open financial infrastructure. In the year since I joined PoolTogether, I redesigned the user experience from the ground up, implementing a design system, creating an entirely new user interface and running user testing sessions with dozens of users. I redesigned PoolTogether.com, including creating a series of complex SVG animations. I also created two new brands, one for a team that spun out of PoolTogether (Generation Software) and another for Cabana, the new suite of open source tools for PoolTogether.

For the launch of PoolTogether Version 5 I created a content marketing campaign and a series of multimedia NFTs using a variety of AI tools including Anthropic, Jasper, ChatGPT, Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, and RunwayML.

At Generation (the team I transitioned to in July 2023) I rapidly designed a series of open source developer tools (Cabana Factory, Cabana Lists, and Cabanalytics, Cabana Yield Swaps) to support teams building on PoolTogether.

A primary focus for the PoolTogether team over the last year has been on further decentralizing the protocol, turning it into a "hyperstructure" –a "Crypto protocol that can run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption or intermediaries"

This makes for a unique design challenge. The Cabana interface and all of the Cabana tools are designed with minimal dependencies. There is no database, and a limited set of subgraphs are needed for the interface. Everything about the protocol is open source and free, from the design, to the front end code, to the smart contracts. Beyond the core smart contracts, much of the protocol's functions are handled by a series of open source bots that are incentivized to keep the system ticking along, distributing prizes at random.

The Cabana interface is designed to be permissionless. As an open source, composable piece of software, anyone can deploy a prize vault using PoolTogether smart contracts. That's a benefit, but it also introduces risk to end users who could end up using un-tested or even malicious vaults. To mitigate that risk, Cabana uses 'vault lists'. By default, the app shows a limited set of trusted vaults, but users can load in new vault lists to interact with more exotic vaults. Designing for decentralization has been one of the most exciting things about my work with PoolTogether.

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