MUXA Design Studio
MUXA Design Studio
A clean, on-chain options trading app designed to help novice users trade, hedge, and earn, without needing to think like a professional trader to get started.
Valorem partnered with us to shape their product strategy during a remote design sprint, with the goal of launching an early prototype at ETH Denver, one of the largest gatherings in the Ethereum community.
Together, we built a consumer-grade experience that lets users open, manage, and hedge options positions, all from one simple, gas-efficient protocol. From competitor research to final designs, we focused on empowering novice traders with the tools and clarity they need to trade confidently and with minimal risk.
An option is a contract that gives you the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell an asset at a set price before a set date. People use options in two ways: to bet that a price will move, or to hedge, which is a way of buying insurance against a position they already hold. Options are powerful, and they are also one of the most intimidating instruments in finance, wrapped in jargon like strikes, expiries, and premiums that scares most newcomers off before they begin.
"On-chain" means the whole thing runs on a public blockchain rather than through a traditional brokerage. There is no account to open and no company holding your money; you connect a crypto wallet, a kind of digital keychain like MetaMask, and the protocol executes the trade directly. "Gas-efficient" refers to keeping the network fee you pay for each transaction, known as gas, as low as possible. Removing the middleman is the promise of decentralized finance, or DeFi, but it also removes the safety rails a first-time trader instinctively expects.
That was the brief in one sentence: make options approachable for people who have never traded one, without dumbing the product down or hiding the genuine risk involved. Most DeFi options tools at the time assumed you already knew what you were doing. Valorem wanted the opposite.
We mapped each set of flows individually, then designed and tested them one at a time. Working this way let us get feedback on the sequence of actions, not just the look of any single screen. In on-chain trading the order of steps matters more than usual, because a confirmed transaction cannot be undone and a confused user can lose real money in a way they cannot in most apps.
The hardest journey to get right was opening a position. A trader starts in a strategy builder, picks the asset they want to trade, such as ETH, then chooses a strategy that matches their outlook on the market:
From there they customize the contract, adjusting quantity, expiry date, or strike price, and the app requests a live quote before anything is committed. We deliberately separated "configure" from "confirm" so a novice can explore the trade-offs of a position, or back out entirely, before any money moves. The cancel path is as much a part of the design as the buy path.
In a DeFi app the first screen is not a sign-up form, it is "connect your wallet." For someone new to crypto this is the single biggest point of drop-off, because connecting a wallet asks two unfamiliar questions at once: which blockchain network are you on, and which wallet app are you using? Get it wrong and nothing works, with no obvious explanation why.
We broke the moment into two clearly numbered steps. First the user chooses a network from a short, recognizable set, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, and Celo. Then they pick a wallet, such as MetaMask, WalletConnect, Rainbow, or Argent. Finally, and this is the part most apps skip, we confirm success out loud, showing the connected account and balance with a plain "your wallet has been successfully connected" rather than silently dropping the user into the app and leaving them to guess whether it worked.
Opening a trade is only half the job. A trader also has to see what they hold and be able to exit it, which in options is called redeeming or settling. We designed a portfolio view that lists every open and closed position with its key numbers at a glance, then a detail view for any single position.
The detail view spells out the figures that decide whether a trade was worth it: the premium, the price paid to open the option; the break-even point, the price the asset has to reach before the trade turns a profit; and the maximum gain and maximum loss, the best and worst cases laid out in advance. Putting the worst case in plain sight, before the user commits, is a deliberate choice. A novice should never be surprised by how much they can lose.
Two details close the loop on trust. Options expire on a fixed date, and an option you forget about can expire worthless, so we built in an opt-in reminder that alerts the user a day before expiry. And every completed trade links out to Etherscan, the public record of the transaction on the blockchain, so the user can independently verify that what the app told them actually happened.
Before any polished screen existed, the trading interface started as a hand-drawn wireframe. Sketching first is cheap and fast: it is easy to throw away, and it forces the conversation onto structure, what information sits where and in what order, before anyone argues about color. The early desktop sketch already worked out the core trading table, the buy and sell controls, the expiry filters, and the expected profit-and-loss chart that would later become a centerpiece of the product.
We explored a desktop layout early, then made a call: the prototype would ship mobile-first, because the people testing it at ETH Denver would be standing in a conference hall holding a phone, not sitting at a desk. Designing for the real moment of use mattered more than designing for the most spacious screen.
Many trading apps lean on flashing reds and greens, countdown timers, and other urgency cues that quietly nudge people toward riskier behavior. For an audience of first-time traders, that felt wrong. We built a visual language around calm blues and purples and a clear typographic hierarchy, using Neue Montreal for large headings and Styrene A LC for smaller text. The interface should lower a beginner's heart rate, not raise it.
The same restraint carried into the data visualization. The profit-and-loss chart that shows how a position pays off across different prices was kept simple and readable, so a novice could understand the shape of their risk at a glance rather than decode a dense professional terminal.
The entire engagement was remote and fast, a single week from kickoff to a working prototype. To keep a distributed team moving at sprint pace, we ran working sessions in a shared virtual room, meeting as avatars around a virtual whiteboard with screens we could all draw on together. It gave a remote sprint the feeling of a team in one room, which is exactly the energy a one-week deadline needs.
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