Category: Sector

Categories
Blockchain Financial Services Technology

Blockchain ecommerce is keeping the secondary luxury market honest

Florian Martigny, founder of Hong Kong-based platform Luxify plans to launch a new standard in blockchain ecommerce. Espeo Blockchain consultants laid out ways the company can leverage the technology and corner the pre-owned luxury goods market. We’d like to share how we did it and what we learned from the project. 

If you’re a bargain hunter with expensive tastes, finding a legitimate seller can be a challenge. At the same time, legitimate re-sellers face a suspicious customer base. This feedback loop limits demand and drive prices down. We’re helping Luxify and their network of pre-owned dealers change this. A blockchain marketplace can help verify and track luxury items — such as art or real estate — making the assets much easier to buy and sell.

Pain points

Luxify already connects affluent buyers with luxury retailers. We found that counterfeit goods pose a real risk to the business. Knock-off watches or forged handbags can make their way into the system limiting consumer trust. Ordering online takes a leap of faith. As ecommerce grows globally, the industry needs effective ways to fight fakes.  The blockchain authentication system we proposed will help close the trust gap. If there is one thing that blockchain technology excels at it’s establishing immutable records among key stakeholders who may not otherwise trust each other or share information. Blockchain ecommerce will boost trust and attract more consumers.

Martigny reached out to Espeo Blockchain with one question: how can blockchain help my business? His experience running Luxify gives him a unique view of the market. Through our consulting project, we answered his questions and delivered a solid business plan for a blockchain authentication solution. Our proposal lays out a system to verify brand authenticity, track ownership, and protect the value of items through tokenization.

Luxify blockchain ecommerce

Since 2013, Luxify has been a market for new and used luxury goods. The company plans to meet the ever-growing demand for high-end western brands, especially in Asia. The company’s mission is to be the first to innovate luxury ownership by establishing an integrated mechanism for authenticity and traceability. However, blockchain is not a solution in itself — only a tool to streamline the business.

Customers ready to spend want stronger guarantees. Deep cooperation between the Luxify platform as well as a network of external sellers and experts help establish credibility. ERC-721 tokens do the rest. Our plan for a blockchain marketplace uses these to transfer ownership. Experience with fakes on other online platforms limits the overall market. Tech innovation especially blockchain will help the market expand.

Market Challenges

One of the main threats facing the $1.2 trillion luxury industry is as I mentioned counterfeit goods. Whole workshops of counterfeiters have perfected their techniques to roll out a steady stream of imitations. To the untrained eye, they’re hard to spot. While some of the existing methods to verify and trace luxury goods are somewhat adequate, they’re not particularly scalable. The profit from producing counterfeit products keeps pace with the overall luxury market giving an ever-increasing incentive to traffic fakes.

This not only erodes consumer trust but also helps fund criminal networks. Despite efforts to combat the spread of fakes, online retailers such as Amazon and Alibaba are still plagued by counterfeiting. Efforts to limit the spread so far are ineffective or simply don’t scale. They mostly involve banning scam sellers from the platform, which is not sustainable. Market forces are far more effective at deterring the practice.

With these challenges in mind, blockchain consultants Francois Devillez and Marcin Zduniak dove in laying the groundwork for a workable blockchain solution. Devillez recalled the project saying he always wants to know what product the market needs before starting a consulting project.

“Don’t try to disrupt a whole market,” he said. “Try to find your niche. If blockchain tech can help your business, then we can work on that, but if blockchain is not necessary, I don’t hesitate to say it.”

Obviously, by the consultation phase, we already have a pretty good idea that blockchain is a good fit for the client. For a luxury good ecommerce platform such as Luxify the lack of trust between buyer and seller is the major stumbling block — something we can solve. Everything else comes down to scalability.

Blockchain authentication

Over several days of consultation, Devilez and Zduniak crafted a tailor-made pitch deck for Martigny finding the best way for him to launch a blockchain ecommerce network. While he had a vision for using blockchain tech, refining this vision into a workable solution was our goal. Questions about public/private blockchains and STO/no STO were vital.

Of course, due to the counterfeiting and consumer trust issue, blockchain technology addresses a real market need. Verifying authenticity and establishing a clear ownership history helps to increase this trust. But how will the company actually do it? For digital assets, tokenization makes sense, but tracking physical assets with blockchain proved more challenging and still requires a level of centralization. One of our proposals is for the company to hire a team of vetted experts that they can send to sellers, verify the pricey watch is authentic, apply a tamper-proof RFID tag, and create an ERC-721 token to represent ownership.

We chose the RFID route precisely because an attempt to remove one breaks it and renders it useless. This solves the problem of trying to transfer the tag to a counterfeit item. Solutions like this already exist without the need for blockchain technology, of course. However, the real business value comes from the fact that only one expert needs to authenticate an item one time. Once approved, it will be on the blockchain ecommerce platform forever. Instead of hiring experts every time you’d like to sell your watch, you only need to do it once. This both reduces the cost and time of buying and selling luxury items.

Technical solutions

Our proposal for a blockchain marketplace uses Ethereum to handle transactions on the blockchain authentication system. Ethereum offers a robust network we’ve used for many of our clients. In terms of Ethereum scalability, we proposed using Plasma techniques to maintain asset storage. Platforms such as the Loom Network use similar solutions with sidechains to maintain a safe state of token assets.

Luxify tokens themselves will be non-fungible ERC-721 tokens which represent item ownership. As mentioned above, RFID tags attached by a team of experts will establish authenticity and enter the asset onto the blockchain ecommerce registry. Users will also have to keep their tokens in a wallet. We proposed a wallet integrated into a UX-friendly React native mobile application. This will reduce the time of development considerably.

Conclusion

We believe that Luxify and their partners will corner the luxury market with their blockchain marketplace. Our consultations with Martigny allowed us to get a better grasp of what the company would like to do with blockchain technology, and how to best achieve these goals together. Espeo Blockchain consultants produced a detailed pitch deck to show to investors. Having a clear, detailed plan allows the company to set development milestones and calculate ROI.

Luxify and a network of re-sellers are leveraging blockchain technology to cut down on fake goods and introduce greater trust into the market. Their first-mover advantage sets them apart in the region allowing them to reach their target ahead of the competition. Ecommerce will greatly benenfit from blockchain authentication — especially in the luxury sector. While blockchain technology is not a cure-all for every business, authenticity and traceability challenges make the second-hand luxury market a solid use case.

Thinking of leveraging blockchain in your business? Reach out to us for valuable insights into this fast-paced ecosystem.

Categories
Blockchain Financial Services

Introducing Gardener, our homegrown Ethereum oracle

If smart contracts and blockchain technology are going to disrupt anything, they need a way to speak to the outside world. Also known as the blockchain oracle problem, blockchains can’t gather off-chain data without help. Enter the Ethereum oracle — or a way to connect smart contracts with outside information. Until now, there are only a few blockchain oracles on the market, each with limitations — and none for free. Espeo Blockchain development team has changed that. We’ve just launched the first open-source Ethereum oracle, Gardener. At Espeo we strongly believe in transparency and would like to share the code with you. 

Gardener

Before we get into the Ethereum oracle, and the blockchain oracle problem, let’s start with a metaphor that I think captures what oracles do. Imagine a big, beautiful garden with lots of plants. But they’re not everyday plants. Instead, they can talk to each other and they thrive on information. Unfortunately, the garden is surrounded by a high wall, so no one inside can see over it.

Lucky for the plants, there is a gardener, who comes in to take care of them — and fill them in on what’s happening outside. The plants trust everything that the gardener says, and he also feels the responsibility since the information he passes to the plants is their only version of the truth about the world beyond the walls.

Sometimes the plants get suspicious and want the gardener to prove what he says. Let’s say they want to know if any apples grow outside. They want to see an apple from the other side.

Of course, the gardener has to bring an apple with him in order to convince the plants that he’s telling the truth. The gardener knows he can’t lie. If the plants demand proof and discover he’s lying, they would never trust him again and he would lose all his friends in the garden. Living in a state of symbiosis, the plants need the gardener to get information about the outside world and the gardener needs the plants’ trust to keep his job. 

Now switch the walled garden for the blockchain oracle problem, the plants for smart contracts, and the gardener for the Ethereum oracle.

The blockchain oracle problem

Even though it may sound like the plot of a children’s book, our fictional garden demonstrates a few key things about oracles and the problems they address. An oracle in blockchain terminology is an off-chain solution, which acts as a trusted user for a smart contract, which can feed it with data it needs — just like the gardener.

For a deeper dive into the Ethereum oracle topic, you can read my previous article here.

During multiple blockchain development projects at Espeo, we hit the same problem. Smart contracts can cooperate with each other but they have one serious limitation — the blockchain oracle problem. Like the plants in the walled garden, they can’t fetch anything from the world outside of their own blockchain. Do you need to check the current price of bitcoin in an Ethereum smart contract? Sorry, nope. Weather in London? Forget it. In most of our projects, we lacked a good tool to do it. So we built a solution.

Why start a new project?

In the blockchain ecosystem, there are already a few solutions to the blockchain oracle problem. The most popular is OraclizeIT, which our team found really useful. It supports many different data sources (e.g. URL, IPFS, random, computation). It met our expectations in terms of functionality and we used it in our first implementations.

Another very promising solution is Chainlink. It’s flexible and capable of providing almost any input data to the smart contract and generating an output for other blockchains, payments, etc… The biggest problem, however, is that it only lives on a test network and isn’t ready for production use quite yet.

TownCrier is another solution from Cornell University developers. Their strong academic background results in a completely different approach using Trusted Execution Environment — Intel SGX in particular. This approach guarantees that no one can alter data during processing, because the whole process lives in a safe enclave, which isn’t accessible from any other process or area.

A drawback of this solution is that it has very limited functionality and hasn’t been updated for a while. Chainlink recently acquired TownCrier so it seems things may start to move forward but most probably we’ll still need to wait for a fully functional production-ready solution.

Of course, these solutions are only available as SaaS products and the code isn’t open-source or free for the community. Espeo Blockchain places transparency among its core values, which is especially important for blockchain solutions as that’s one of the key blockchain advantages. That’s why we decided to create our own Ethereum oracle product, which would be free and open-source for the community. In parallel to implementing current projects with OraclizeIT (to deliver them quickly), we started working on a replacement. That’s how Gardener was born.

Current State

Today we are happy to say that we have a working version we can share with you. The product is in its early days but we successfully use it internally and can’t wait to challenge it with your use cases.

What we have now:

  • Ethereum smart contracts for the oracle
  • Ethereum libraries for integrating the oracle into your contracts
  • Off-chain server written in Node.js
  • Simple monitor web application for watching what happens with the requests
  • Documentation hosted at gardener.readthedocs.io
  • A GitHub organization with MIT-licensed open source repositories ready to be cloned

Summing up, so far we’ve delivered everything you need in order to fetch any data from any public API into Ethereum smart contracts.

Roadmap

What we have for now is limited but fully functional and ready to use. However, it’s not enough for us. We have big ambitions and a plan on how to improve our solution greatly.

First, we would like to add an ETH and ERC20 based fee model. This would give Gardener instance owners the ability to decide who should pay for the request to the Ethereum oracle — them or the users creating requests. Also, it would allow instance owners to add a profit margin, if necessary.

Next, we will focus on accepting more data source types and formatting options. This step will include parsers for unstructured (binary) data, access to IPFS, random data source and access to closed APIs in a secure and safe way. We will also want to incorporate heavy computing calculation using container-based approach. All of these will give users great flexibility and no constraint in the matter of data type and source.

Later, we will focus on providing proofs to our solution, specifically Intel SGX. It will guarantee data immutability during fetching and parsing processes.

Finally, we want to move on to blockchain integrations other than the Ethereum network. We will support EOS, Hyperledger Fabric, Corda and Hyperledger Sawtooth.

The above goals are something we want to focus on the first place but we don’t exclude other improvements. If you see a particular feature lacking please drop me an email or raise an issue in our Github.

Stay Tuned

Effective blockchain projects need oracles to get data from the outside. We’ve launched the first open-source solution to the blockchain oracle problem.

This is the first article from the series on the Gardener project and we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback. All the code is MIT-licensed and you can find it on GitHub. If you have any questions or would like to get help with incorporating Gardener in your project don’t hesitate to reach me by email: krzysztof.wedrowicz@espeo.eu. Hope to hear from you soon!

Categories
Blockchain Healthcare Technology

Blockchain in healthcare: how the technology could fix the industry in 2020

If you’ve spent any amount of time in a hospital, you’ve had first-hand experience with the inefficiencies of the healthcare system. Just about everyone has a story or two about red tape. More than being irritating, this friction raises prices, lowers patient satisfaction, and can even put people’s health at risk.

Many tout the benefits of blockchain technology in healthcare data management and the overall patient experience. But let’s take a closer look. What can blockchain actually do for healthcare technology? What will it not do? Is blockchain technology a good fit?

Establishing trust in healthcare technology

Like many blockchain use cases, the first benefit for the healthcare industry is removing the need for trust. In a previous blog post, developer Michał Chatłas took a hard look at blockchain and whether it’s really worth it. “Blockchain technology is beneficial in specific industries where people can’t trust one another,” he wrote. “By design, blockchains establish trust through cryptography. Parties don’t have to trust each other or third parties.” Strong use cases exist in industries where smart contracts can help verify data. Limiting access to sensitive records is another useful feature.
Some startups have begun leveraging blockchain technology to address some healthcare data management challenges. London-based MedicalChain has developed a platform for patients to control access to their medical records. PokitDok’s DokChain hopes to facilitate data exchange across the healthcare landscape. Mediledger, meanwhile, is tracking and verifying medicine in similar ways as you might track food or airplane parts in the supply chain.

Distributed data

At first glance, distributed ledger technology appears to benefit the healthcare industry by storing patient data in all the nodes of a blockchain platform. Allowing hospitals, insurance companies, and patients access to medical records may benefit the industry as a whole. getting everyone on the same page would ease some of the industry’s pain points. Blockchain-based healthcare technologies could significantly reduce the time to track down information across systems.
Currently, patient records exist on centralized databases. It’s unclear how secure these databases are and who has access. Hackers are increasingly targeting healthcare institutions to steal valuable data. A blockchain-based platform could provide a useful tool for controlling who should, and who shouldn’t see patient data.

Patient satisfaction

Consumers would not be the only ones who benefit, however. Hospital administration could check insurance information and see which procedures are covered. Insurance companies could track procedures and automatically pay healthcare providers for services instead of waiting for someone to enter it manually. Increased efficiency and savings will, in theory, optimize the industry and pass savings to people.
Lead blockchain developer at Espeo, Krzysztof Wędrowicz offered an example of a medical emergency. “Let’s say you go on vacation and you break your leg,” he said. “It’s really hard [for the distant hospital] to get your medical history and insurance information quickly. Of course, when you have a broken leg your doctor wants to repair it as fast as possible.” The doctor may have to make quick health decisions that your insurance does not pay for.
In addition to treating a medical emergency, the hospital also needs to determine where to send the bill, or else eat the losses. This uncertainty in the system creates a lot of redundant work and could put people’s health at risk. A blockchain platform which coordinates patient records, a history of procedures, and insurance claims could greatly reduce redundancies and prevent losses. It will also improve the healthcare business model as well as patient experience.

Healthcare data management and confidentiality

However, keeping confidential medical records on a fully auditable, transparent ledger raises privacy concerns. A tech-savvy person could connect the dots. Every person accessing patient records would become a point of weakness. While no one would be able to change entries without consensus, anyone could see the entry. Seeing when and where a transaction occurred could cause significant problems for medical confidentiality.
Take abortion as an extreme example. In countries where the procedure is criminalized regardless of where the procedure occurred, investigators could find out. Even where it is legal, attackers could still use the data for malicious ends. Controlling who sees medical data and for how long through encryption is key.
Wędrowicz believes the benefits outweigh the negatives. Private, permissioned blockchains such as Hyperledger fabric or Corda would be the best fit in blockchain-based healthcare. Permissioned blockchains allow companies or consortiums of companies to set rules for who gets access to data on the blockchain. Though you would still need to trust everyone with permission.

Leveraging blockchain in healthcare

As I mentioned earlier, some startups have started to apply private blockchains in the healthcare industry. London-based startup MedicalChain aims to give patients full control over their medical data. In an interview over Telegram, communications manager, Tim Robinson explained the company offers a new paradigm of transparency to patients.
“MedicalChain safeguards sensitive information by encrypting all data through the platform,” he said. “Hyperledger Fabric provides the means for an advanced access control mechanism, so that patients can be in full control of their data and who has access to this… Every transaction will be logged on the blockchain, including the individuals who gained access to this, at what time, and what data [was accessed].”
Patients give their explicit consent and can revoke it as they wish. People can also proactively grant access to specialists or healthcare establishments in case they’re incapacitated. Of course, the decision is still the patient’s decision. “[Users] take responsibility should this not be provided, ” said Robinson.
“To mitigate the chances of access being denied in emergency situations, we can set the platform up so that permission is an opt-in service (which is much more in line with what presently happens) at the discretion of the user, as opposed to an opt-out setup, where blanketed permission is the default.”
Users’ next of kin can also grant access as long as the patient has set it up that way. Robinson contends that it is a much more patient-centric model than what currently exists. 

Lingering challenges

It’s important to remember that a blockchain is only a tool, one that would still need oversight and ethical guidelines. Determining who has access and for how long is vital in healthcare data management. Allowing healthcare professionals to quickly and easily access this information while also controlling distribution is one of blockchain’s lingering challenges.
The potential for entering false data or recording a misdiagnosis is still there, but at least data would remain in one accessible place. One specific aspect that blockchain would excel at in healthcare data management is maintaining data integrity. Unauthorized edits or deletions would not occur without a timestamp.
Forbes contributor Robert Lord wrote that one of blockchain’s advantages is that it would fight against integrity-based attacks. Careless insiders or hackers could cause patient safety issues and call an institution’s reputation into question. “Blockchain technology is an excellent counter to these integrity-based attacks, he wrote, “and it’s a good forward-looking tool we might deploy to address them.” Blockchain establishes a fully auditable immutable record of changes.

Conclusion

Healthcare’s complex web of actors makes it a compelling use case for blockchain technology. Stakeholders who don’t cooperate and who don’t necessarily trust each other could benefit from a decentralized healthcare data management platform. Blockchain could empower patients by allowing them to control access to medical records. Ensuring data integrity and making it considerably cheaper to send and receive medical data are two of the most compelling cases.
As with any new technology, there are major trade-offs to consider. While keeping medical records in one place would greatly reduce the time and cost to track it down, it also raises privacy concerns. Maintaining data integrity is one of its most powerful features blockchain tech offers so far. Savings for healthcare providers, insurance companies, and consumers could spur widespread adoption. Until then, prices will continue to rise, and patients health will suffer.

Categories
Blockchain Design Software

Designing for blockchain: How to build trust through good UX

I recently sat down with blockchain product designer, Ariel Hajbos to get his take on some essential elements of good blockchain design and some of the trends in blockchain app UX. Creating an elegant, responsive design is important in all web and mobile projects, but designing for blockchain poses new challenges. Trust-building features and even color choice are vital to an overall comfortable user experience.

Blockchain UX and UI remains a major hurdle for people to actually use the technology. In an earlier interview, blockchain consulting director, Dominik Zyskowski said good design is the key to widespread adoption. “Designers,” he said, “have to create a simple, frictionless experience to attract more users.”

So far, blockchain-based apps act much differently than traditional ones. For us who work with the underlying tech every day, it’s obvious, but if you don’t, blockchain apps may not behave as you expect. They tend to lag — and when you’re seeing charts, numbers, and of course your account balance, this can cause a lot of anxiety. Building trust through good UX is the main goal. Designing for blockchain apps involves regular feedback and trust-building features that create a pleasant user experience. Better UX will encourage more consumers to incorporate the technology into their daily lives.

Ariel Hajbos is a product designer at Espeo Blockchain and has been designing for blockchain projects during his time on the team. He started his career in graphic design and has since become integral in Espeo’s blockchain design projects such as the derivatives trading platform, CloseCross, and the mobile version of the crypto exchange, Trade. io.

In your opinion what is the most important aspect of blockchain design? What’s challenging about designing for blockchain projects?

I would say that the most important thing when designing for blockchain is that the apps often deal with financial assets — users approach these applications will a lot of distance. They’d like to get to know the apps better, know the deliverables, and know the company that built it. That’s a common thing. So it’s super important in my opinion to always design for trust. My role as a designer is to win this trust from users and communicate the ideas behind the application as well as possible so they feel comfortable using it.

The principle of designing for trust is something which is useful in other categories as well. It’s not only with blockchain, but any kind of application you build, you’d like to achieve this.

That’s an interesting point — about building trust through design. How do you do it, actually? What are some features you’ve incorporated that do this?

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If there are some patterns that users are familiar with that would be the very best first step. Using a design system and being consistent in your blockchain design creates this feeling that everything is sound and everything in the user interface is in its place. It’s also good to avoid jargon — you can’t assume that all your users will know it so it’s good to present things clearly. If you approach it in the proper way — if you keep in mind some things that are important in UX design in general, you can build trust.

The last thing I would say is creating a feedback loop — some kind of active guidance where users see a responsive design. Even if we build something and release it it’s only the beginning of the road so it’s important to be with the users through the whole app-building building process — and its future development. End users should feel as if they have the opportunity to leave their feedback, and that we’re listening and implementing changes.

In some of the projects that you’ve worked on, what were some common features you’ve changed?

Aesthetics, number of clicks, how the app presents data, and the general flow are some features we’ve received feedback on and changed. It’s always good to discuss those matters with the actual users too. It’s a very common thing because we work in an integrative process.  We build something, we analyze it, gather feedback, and correct it — again and again and again to reach our goal no matter what the goal is. Whether it’s a business assumption or usability.

I also encourage product owners to show the UI and UX to the people that will use their app — a demo group — and gather feedback from them.  it’s also good to clash that feedback from the business perspective and then for the user’s perspective and then get something good from that.

What aesthetic changes have end-users asked for and how does it affect blockchain design?

The applications that I built with Espeo were in general, were pretty consistent. They were focused on a goal It had to be achieved according to some of the steps. There wasn’t much space to think about adding something new. However, when we designed the Trade.io mobile application, and they were happy with the UI and UX, they requested we add additional features such as different color modes in the app. We cranked up the interface to add a dark mode and a color mode.

This wasn’t only an aesthetic decision — some of the users were accustomed to shifting between different color modes. It was easier for them to analyze data and they lacked this feature in the app before we added it. While I’m designing for blockchain apps, it doesn’t seem very important at first glance but if you start to think about it but it’s something really helpful when users have to analyze data quickly and act on it.

So it had nothing to do with how the app actually works, just how it looks?

Yes, it was only about how it looks. However, you have to remember if this is a blockchain app so we were struggling with presenting a lot of data, a lot of numbers, and a lot of charts. It’s always in the context of something positive and negative when you gain or lose assets.

For some people, different color approaches for gains and losses were less stressful. Magenta/cyan (pictured above) instead of green/red was an easier approach. It felt less stressful — more like a game. It’s a kind of user approach for such a topic. It’s not only about using a clean and simple minimalistic UI it’s not always the super idea that will satisfy all users.

What values among blockchain app users influence design do you think? I mean blockchain people skew skeptical — they don’t trust anything. How does this influence UX?

Yeah, so there are a few layers to that — first of all users have to trust the machine. It’s important that the user believes that the device is responsive And that he’s getting all the information that he needs to get. It’s also connected to blockchain technology itself.

Since it’s a decentralized technology, we have to think about why users will trust the blockchain and why blockchain technology is so important to them. These are new opportunities and it’s something very exciting. So this trust in the machine and in the algorithm is a challenge for us. Designers have to help users to trust the mechanisms blockchain technology.

Aside from blockchain itself, users have to trust the people building the applications as well. For instance, in the CloseCross app that we helped design, users predict the value of assets in the future and you have to be sure that it’s accurate and that you’ll receive your assets back. To combine those two things the trust for the application itself and the trust in the UI and the UX of the application a designer’s role is to demonstrate this trust.

Reducing cognitive load, guiding with consistency, and displaying messages properly goes a long way. All those things are connected to blockchain design and UI/UX design generally. It’s a designers role to demonstrate these things. With blockchain apps, you have to signal to the user and say ‘hey, you’re fine, your assets are fine, everything is happening as it should.’ Grasping this proper flow is something that I strive for.

How do you get into the minds of everyday users — those who may not know, or really care about how something works, just that it works.

It’s always a matter of communication. You always have to listen to users and also the people you’re working with. Designing for blockchain is a collaborative process. You have to be an open, empathetic person. I have to think about different approaches to look at a problem from a different perspective. It depends on the project —  lots of our projects aren’t structured in a super strict flow.

There’s not always time for a lot of proper research. My role is to always try to understand the product as well as possible — try to pick through it in layers and from different angles of blockchain design. But my job doesn’t end there I also help guide in the implementation phase because I’m one of the few people, along with the product owner who knows the interface entirely.

I have to be a communicative person — I have to speak up with the product owner and present as many methods as possible based on the resources you already have. If there’s a space, I speak up and discuss with the users. If there’s time, I also map out a user story, write a backlog, and discuss it with developers. It’s a matter of constant discussion and analysis.

Which project that you’ve worked on are you the proudest of?

For sure Trade.io and CloseCross. For Trade.io there was already a web platform we didn’t build. Instead, we had to transform and migrate those functionalities and features to a mobile app. That was kind of challenging, however, the client was very helpful during the research part and they delivered a lot of already started wireframes and ideas for the UI. We didn’t build it from scratch but we built on top of something that already existed it was a super nice input at the very beginning that helped us to start from a good level.

With CloseCross, it was a project we helped design this platform in very close corporation with Vahibav Khadikar, the CEO. We had really long and intense sessions analyzing the UI in various versions — we did several versions. We had to think about the features, prototype it rapidly, verify the idea, and then build something on top of that.

CloseCross is a really large application with a lot of design features. As I said earlier, collaboration is something super important — it helps you to come up with really nice ideas and extend your possibilities because there’s no way one person could build something totally from scratch.

What are the main trends in blockchain design?

Trends in blockchain design are constantly changing — but the principles are the same. Design thinking, proper user research, quick evaluation of ideas like low fidelity wireframes. Those are essential tools that deliver really nice outcomes. Designing for blockchain involves trust-building features. The main trend is designing for the global nature of the blockchain — with proper localization and device agnostic.

You’d like to deliver your outcome and deliver the design you working on to as many people as possible so it’s super important also for trust to think about different languages and different devices. You have to design systems that work well across environments. 

Conclusion

Even though one blockchain technology’s greatest strengths is ensuring trust, Many users remain skeptical. Blockchain design is the most important challenge for widespread adoption. Cumbersome user experience will only hamper further adoption of blockchain among the wider public. Effective UX design is essential to create useful, valuable blockchain apps. designing for blockchain apps involves building trust through regular feedback and frictionless navigation.

Getting blockchain design right to make end users comfortable — and maybe not even notice the underlying tech, needs innovative solutions. Hajbos and designers like him are driving greater adoption of blockchain applications.