Helping a country with low crypto literacy onboard, trade, and manage digital assets through a mobile-first product designed for absolute beginners and serious traders alike.
Role:
Product Designer(Mobile, Web, Admin Panel)
Team:
1 Senior + 3 Product Designers
Timeline:
2.5 years
Platforms:
iOS, Android, Web, Admin Panel
Status:
Live, 150,000+ users, 10,000+ Play Store downloads
Context
Bitnet is Georgia's leading crypto and digital asset platform. Its mission is unusually ambitious for a fintech: to make cryptocurrency genuinely accessible to people with zero financial or technical background, not just experienced traders.
When I joined, Bitnet had a partial design system in place and a redesign of the mobile app and website was already underway. My job was to take ownership of major flows alongside the rest of the design team, push the system further, and ship across all three surfaces - mobile, web, and the internal admin panel, with consistency.
Over 2.5 years I grew from junior to mid-level designer and became the team's go-to for design system and component work, second only to our team lead.
The Challenge
Crypto in Georgia is a cold-start market. Most users had never owned a digital asset, didn't understand wallets, and were nervous about putting money into something they couldn't physically see. The product had to do two contradictory things at once.
For beginners, it had to feel as ordinary as a banking app, no jargon, no intimidation, no decisions users couldn't reverse. For experienced users, it had to provide the depth, speed, and control they expected from a serious trading platform. And every feature had to work consistently across mobile (the primary surface), web, and an admin panel used by Bitnet's internal operations team.
My Approach
I worked from four principles that guided every screen I shipped.
1. Mobile-first, always. The vast majority of our users in Georgia interact with crypto through their phones. Every flow was designed mobile-first — touch targets, thumb-zone navigation, progressive disclosure, and only then adapted up to web. This kept the mobile experience from feeling like a stripped-down version of the web product, which is how most cross-platform fintech apps fail.
2. Plain language over crypto jargon. Instead of letting "liquidity," "slippage," or "gas fees" appear without context, I worked to surface explanations inline, small, dismissible hints that taught users what something meant the first time they encountered it. Crypto terminology is a usability problem disguised as a vocabulary problem, and most platforms ignore it.
3. The design system as a product. I treated our component library as a product in its own right, versioned, documented, and built to scale. When a designer or developer pulled a button or input from the system, they got the same behavior across mobile, web, and admin. This eliminated drift and let our small team ship at the velocity of a much bigger one.
4. Accessibility by default. Color contrast, focus states, error handling, and screen-reader-friendly structure were baked into components, not added at the end. In a market where the user base ranges from teenagers to retirees, accessibility isn't optional, it's table stakes.
What I Shipped
Across 2.5 years I contributed to and owned major parts of three connected surfaces.
Mobile app (iOS + Android) – Onboarding, KYC, wallet, buy/sell flows, transaction history, portfolio tracking, and the notification system.
Web platform – Trading dashboard, account management, asset detail pages, and marketing surfaces, all built on the same design system.
Admin panel – Internal tools for user management, KYC review, transaction monitoring, and platform operations.
I am unable to share detailed screenshots of the full design system due to confidentiality agreements
Design system – Component library, design tokens, documentation, and patterns library used daily by the design and development teams across all three platforms.
I am unable to share detailed screenshots of the Admin panel due to confidentiality agreements
Outcome
Bitnet is live and has grown into one of Georgia's most-used crypto platforms.
150,000+ active users
10,000+ Play Store downloads
Cross-platform product shipped and maintained across mobile, web, and admin
Design system adopted as the single source of truth for the product team
"Giorgi brings clarity to complex problems. He's focused, practical, and consistently delivers work that makes sense for both users and the business. I'd gladly work with him again."
Lasha Monaselidze, Senior Product Designer at Bitnet
What I took away: 2.5 years inside a real fintech taught me that great product design in this domain isn't about beautiful screens, it's about earning user trust with every interaction. When someone is moving real money, every label, every confirmation, every error message is part of the product.