Based
The world's first internet opinion market. A mobile app that turns cultural trends into tradable positions with TikTok's feel and a real trading engine underneath. My job was to hide the financial machinery and let the fun come through.
A consumer wrapper on a financial engine
Based is a SocialFi product with a direct pitch: take the infinite scroll mechanics of TikTok, combine them with Wall Street trading primitives, and let users take positions on whether a cultural trend is "based" or "cringe." Under the hood there is an automated market maker, perpetual-style positions, a token economy and on-chain settlement. On the surface there is a feed, a swipe and a score.
I came in as Head of Design with complete ownership of product, brand and motion. The mandate from the founders was simple: we need to frontrun culture. My job was to figure out what that actually looks like as a product people open five times a day.
Crypto UX that doesn't feel like crypto
Most web3 consumer apps lose the battle the moment someone opens them for the first time. They leak their complexity into the main surface. Wallets, slippage, gas fees, contract calls. Users bounce before they have even tried the core experience. Based could not afford that. The product had to feel like an arcade game, not a trading terminal, to anyone opening it cold from a friend's invite link.
The design discipline was relentless hiding. Every piece of financial machinery in the app had to be present, had to be correct, and had to be absolutely invisible until the moment a user actually needed it. That tension between "this is technically a trading platform" and "this feels like scrolling TikTok" drove every decision I made.
Scroll. Trade. Profit.
A three-word product loop. The entire experience collapses into three verbs. Scroll the full-screen feed. Tap BASED or CRINGE to take a position. Watch the result resolve. No order books, no order types, no jargon. Just the smallest possible action and the quickest possible feedback. I prototyped over a dozen interaction patterns before landing on the one that felt fast enough to be addictive.
Gamification as the native language. Daily spins on the Wheel of Based, escalating status tiers, the Based Banana Cartel for whales. These are not bolted-on promotions. They are the primary loyalty structure, replacing the retention mechanics a crypto app would normally reach for like APY dashboards, staking flows and airdrop quests. The game layer is the product, not a wrapper around it.
The feed is the trading floor
Every trend in the feed is a live position. Users scroll full-screen video, tap BASED or CRINGE to place a trade and watch the sentiment bar shift in real time. The UI borrows its rhythm from TikTok. Swipe, react, move on. Meanwhile the financial layer settles quietly underneath without the user having to think about it.
No charts. No order books. No confirmation modals cluttering the screen. Just a thumb and an opinion. That simplicity is not accidental. It took weeks of prototyping to strip away every unnecessary step until the core action felt completely effortless.
A visual identity that earns attention
High contrast. Neon accents against deep black. Typography with real personality. Microcopy written the way its users actually talk. The brand system had to fight for a moment in the same feeds it is competing with and win that fight without ever feeling like it is trying too hard.
Every surface in the app, from the profile screen to the settlement modal, inherits the same loud but intentional voice. Consistency is what makes a new product feel like it has been around for years, and that was the goal from day one.
Ten days of testnet, numbers that held
- 47%
- Invite → signup conversion. Nearly half of cold-sent invites turn into active accounts.
- 33%
- D7 retention — users still trading a full week after signup.
- 4–6×
- Weekly return rate per active trader. Habit, not novelty.
- 300+
- Daily active traders sustained in testnet, peaking at 528 weekly.
Ten days into open testnet in February 2026, the numbers told a clear story.
47% of cold-sent invites converted into active signups. Nearly half. That is a UX number, not a marketing number. It means the onboarding flow was doing its job.
33% of those users were still actively trading after a full week. On a crypto product, that level of day-seven retention is almost unheard of. Most web3 apps lose the majority of users within 48 hours.
Active traders were returning four to six times per week. That is habitual use, not a curiosity click. And daily active traders sustained at over 300, peaking at 528 in a single week during testnet.
Both the conversion and retention numbers came directly from the same design decision: hide the financial machinery completely and give people a scroll-and-tap surface that feels native to how they already use their phone.
Every screen, one system
Login, deposit, onboarding, explore, open positions. Every surface inherits the same design language. The product feels like one cohesive thing rather than a collection of features stitched together by different teams at different times. That consistency is what lets a new user feel oriented within their first session.
