Building Orokai
A self-custodial DeFi interface where checking a price, staking, paying and tracking a transaction stop being four products. Five design decisions, what each one cost us, and what it took to hold them across two runtimes and two chain ecosystems.
Project Details
CLIENT
ROLE
Interface design & engineering
Surfaces
Web, iOS, Android
Ecosystems
EVM & Cosmos
Surfaces
Web, iOS, Android
Custody
Non-custodial
The brief
Friction that isn't the chain's fault
Checking a price. Staking a token. Paying for something in crypto. Tracking the transaction afterward. Four separate actions, and in most DeFi products, four separate apps. Nobody wakes up wanting to manage five browser tabs to do one thing.
Working on Orokai's interface, we kept running into the same question: is this friction actually necessary, or is it just what everyone's used to building? Five patterns came out of that process. Each maps to something researchers in behavioral design have understood for decades — the problems DeFi UX runs into aren't new or crypto-specific.
What follows is the design side of that work stated as decision records: the context, what shipped, and what each decision cost. The last part is usually the part that gets left out.
Apps in one workflow 5→1
Context
What shipped
What it cost