Building the design language and the full product for a DeFi trading terminal where users deposit real capital, and where every interface decision affects user trust.
Role:
Solo Product Designer
Team:
Solo (joined post-branding)
Timeline:
6 months
Platforms:
Responsive Website (trading terminal)
Status:
Live
Context
Maicrotrader is an AI-powered, multi-agent trading terminal for Web3 markets. When I joined the startup, the company had a brand identity and a single landing page, but no product, no design system, and no design language beyond a partial color palette.
I came in as the sole designer and built everything that wasn't a logo: the design system, the product UI, every flow, and every interaction. I had no prior Web3 experience, so the first weeks were spent learning the domain, DeFi mechanics, wallet flows, on-chain vs off-chain operations before touching Figma.
The Challenge
Trading terminals are dense, technical, and high-stakes. Users on Maicrotrader deposit real capital and make decisions in seconds. The product had to earn trust on every screen in DeFi, a confusing button can cost a user money, so the interface had to feel as deliberate and reassuring as a traditional finance product, not a crypto experiment.
It also had to visualize what multiple AI agents were doing, why, and how to override them without drowning users in data. And all of it had to be built from zero with no design system, no patterns, and a startup-paced timeline.
My Approach
1. Trust as a design system. The deposit flow, confirmations, and transaction states were the highest-trust moments in the product. I designed these with deliberate friction, clear summaries, explicit confirmations, and visible state changes, so users always knew what was about to happen with their capital before it happened. In traditional UX you'd remove friction from a checkout. In DeFi, you add it on purpose.
2. Information density without overwhelm. Trading terminals live and die on how much they can show without becoming noise. I built a layered information architecture: the most decision-critical data lives in the foreground, secondary data sits one click away, and the rest is on demand. This let serious traders get depth without scaring off newer users.
3. A design system built for a startup, not a Fortune 500. I built the system incrementally, only the components the product actually needed, only the variants we'd actually ship. No over-engineering, no Material-Design-grade documentation. Just enough structure to move fast without drift. This was the right call for a startup with weeks-not-quarters timelines.
4. Learning Web3 before designing Web3. Before any UI work, I spent time understanding wallets, DeFi protocols, gas mechanics, and the deposit/withdraw patterns users were already familiar with from competing products. Designing without this context would have produced something that looked fine but felt wrong to actual Web3 users, and in a category this conservative, "feels wrong" means "I don't trust this."
What I Shipped
Design system built from scratch – tokens, components, layouts, dark theme
Trading terminal UI – agent dashboard, position management, deposit/withdraw flows
Onboarding and wallet connection flows for first-time users
Marketing surfaces and product pages aligned with the new system
Outcome
Maicrotrader launched as a live, working DeFi terminal, built end-to-end in 6 months by a single designer working alongside a small engineering team.
"Working with Giorgi on the Maicrotrader app has been a genuinely great experience. He brings a sharp eye for detail and a real understanding of how design decisions affect user trust – which matters a lot in a DeFi product where people are depositing real capital. From rethinking the deposit flow to tightening up the overall interface, Giorgi approached every brief with clarity and precision. He's the kind of designer who asks the right questions before touching anything, and delivers work that's both clean and considered. Highly recommend him to any Web3 team that takes their product seriously."
Temo Bezhiashvili, CEO of maicrotrader
What I took away: Designing in an unfamiliar domain forced me to slow down and ask better questions. The work I'm proudest of from this project isn't a screen, it's the deposit flow, where every confirmation exists because I understood what users were actually afraid of.