Founding designer at a $3.25B crypto company: a zero-to-one institutional staking product and a design org scaled 1 to 7

Blockdaemon is like AWS for crypto. Exchanges and institutional custodians use it to deploy nodes and stake assets without operating their own data centers. Enterprises like Goldman Sachs and Microsoft are the customer tier.

I joined as the founding designer after Blockdaemon acquired my consultancy. The company raised $207M at a $3.25B valuation during my tenure. There was no design organization. I was the design org.

Over 15 months I shipped two zero-to-one products: the institutional staking dashboard and the Ubiquity developer API. Neither had established UX patterns in crypto. I stood up the research practice from scratch to inform both.

Institutional staking

The staking dashboard was zero-to-one. No competitor had established the design patterns. The users were institutional treasury teams managing portfolios worth hundreds of millions across multiple blockchains. They needed to see total value and validator performance on one screen.

We hired Blockdaemon’s first two researchers and stood up the research practice from scratch. Their interviews with treasury teams changed the design direction. What those users wanted was density plus real-time trust signals. They weren’t trying to avoid information. They were trying to see all of it without drowning in it.

Ubiquity API

Ubiquity was Blockdaemon’s developer-facing API for querying crypto data across chains. The dashboard was the first place developers went to debug what their API keys were doing. The highest-value views turned out to be usage against rate limits and request-log auditing, both surfaced in developer interviews.

Results

The staking product shipped into the $207M Series C materials. When the round closed, the screens investors walked through in those demos traced back to my team.

I grew the design org to seven people. We set up design reviews with real teeth and a weekly research cadence for the first time.

"Blockdaemon nabs $1.3B valuation in $155M funding round. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the funding."

"Blockdaemon raises $28 million in Series A funding to help institutions quickly and securely scale blockchain infrastructure. Round led by Greenspring Associates, with participation from Goldman Sachs."