Making collateralized borrowing understandable
Borrowing against crypto assets is stressful. Most DeFi applications make this worse by using confusing text boxes and complex math. If you make a mistake with your numbers, you face liquidation.
Virtue followed the evolution of the Liquity protocol, moving from a single-asset model to a system that supported multiple types of collateral and dynamic interest rates. My goal was to move away from static forms and create a system where users could actually see and touch their risk boundaries before moving any money.
My role: I led the product direction and designed the full experience, from the initial UX flows to the final UI. I developed a scalable design system and established the core interaction patterns that carried the product through multiple protocol iterations. These UX innovations fundamentally improved how users manage debt and led to a partnership with the Liquity team, who invited us to be an official launch partner for their v2 protocol.
The logic of the bounded range
In most lending apps, your collateral is just a number you type into a box. In Virtue, we made it the starting point of the whole experience.
Instead of typing an amount, users define their collateral using a slider. This single action immediately shows the limits of the system: how much you can borrow, where the safe zone is, and where the risk starts.
Borrowing then becomes an exploration. As you move the loan slider, the interface updates everything in real time: your health ratio, the liquidation price, and the overall safety of your position. The interface does not ask users to guess what will happen. It shows them.
This changes the experience. It moves from “making a choice and seeing the result” to “exploring, understanding, and then deciding.” The system becomes something users can shape and observe, not just configure.
One model for everything
Managing an active loan is usually a mess of different buttons for depositing, withdrawing, or repaying debt. In Virtue, we treated editing a position as a simple continuation of the first step.
The Edit form was nearly identical to the Borrow form. It started with your current position already set on the sliders. To change your loan, you just pulled the sliders left or right from where they were. Since the mental model was the same, there was almost nothing new for the user to learn. Whether you were adding more collateral or paying back debt, the interaction felt familiar and safe.
Reflection
Digital products are often subject to changes outside of the designer's control. Shortly before we were ready to launch, a change in leadership resulted in the project being handed over to a different team. They changed the UI significantly, so the version of Virtue live today is not the product we built.
However, the work on Virtue remains a benchmark for how I approach complex systems. It proved that you can take the difficult math of a smart contract and translate it into something visual and explorable. Replacing manual calculation with visual exploration changed the entire experience. It turned a high-stakes math problem into a tool that gave users a real sense of control over their money.
