From 0 to ecosystem backbone

Pools didn’t begin as a neutral financial product. The brand came first. An external agency created a bold, quirky identity built around a duck mascot and a neubrutalist aesthetic. It was expressive and loud.

The early UI explorations were wild and they pushed that brand directly into the product with heavy contrast and playful layouts. It was memorable and different. It was also risky. Handling real money changes the rules. When users swap tokens or provide liquidity, they are not looking for personality. They are looking for clarity, predictability, and control.

When the project resumed after early internal iterations, the challenge was not to restart but to bring control. The core direction was already there. Together with visual designer Francisco Castagnola, we refined the brand and defined clearer boundaries for how it should behave inside the product. Personality should attract users, not distract them. Marketing could be expressive, but the product needed to feel stable.

We tightened hierarchy, reduced visual noise in transactional states, standardized layout systems, and made critical actions unmistakable. Subtle character remained, including small touches, micro-interactions, and playful easter eggs, but the foundation became calm and trustworthy.

In DeFi, most products are forks at some level. Liquidity models and swap logic are battle-tested. The real question is not how to reinvent them, but where design effort creates the most impact.

I had full ownership of UX and UI decisions, but every choice existed within tension: be clever or be clear, be novel or be reliable, move fast or over-optimize. In the early phase, we deliberately leaned toward established patterns from leading DEXs. Familiar structures reduce cognitive load and predictable flows reduce hesitation. In a new ecosystem, that matters more than originality.

Differentiation came from execution and cohesion. We created a structured layout that made complex data easy to scan, communicated states clearly, and treated the design system as infrastructure rather than decoration.

Once the core patterns were locked in, the next challenge was making the interface adaptable. Pools needed to support different visual themes without losing consistency across the product.

I built a flexible design system with reusable components, clear rules, and theme variables underneath. That gave us room to push the visual direction without reinventing the interface every time.

The result was a UI that could change its tone while staying familiar where it mattered most: patterns, clarity, and trust.

IOTA Rebased was meant to reset the ecosystem, but expectations were low. Earlier upgrades had failed to spark real DeFi activity, so this launch needed to show clear traction from the start.

Within the first week, Pools reached $10M in total value locked, onboarded more than 5,000 users, and sustained six-figure daily trading volume. Liquidity concentrated early, and most new pools launched there first. During its initial phase, it became the default venue on the network.

The product gained traction because it felt reliable from day one. In a new ecosystem, early reliability compounds into momentum.

In financial products, trust is cumulative and fragile. Every inconsistency, unclear state, or decorative distraction slightly erodes it. Every predictable flow, well-structured hierarchy, and accurate feedback loop reinforces it.

Pools went through pauses, reframing, and multiple visual iterations before stabilizing. That process reinforced something I already believed: strong product leadership is often about restraint. It is about consistently knowing when to follow standards, when to push, and when to step back.

Pools was not just a DEX launch. It was the establishment of a liquidity backbone on a new network, shaped through deliberate trade-offs between personality and precision, speed and safety, and originality and trust.

That balance is where real product design lives.