YUSE Wallet — Designing a self-custody crypto wallet for first-time owners
This project is driven by a refined design approach that balances clarity and intention with contemporary visuals and overall cohesive brand harmony.
Client
YUSE (Netherlands-based)
Year
Services
Product Design: IA, flows, UI, design system,
Role
Web Development
The problem
Self-custody wallets are built by crypto natives for crypto natives. The vocabulary (seed phrase, gas, chain, derivation path), the irreversibility of every action, and the fear of a single mistyped address keep most new owners on centralised exchanges — where they don't actually hold their keys.
YUSE Wallet's premise: the security model shouldn't be negotiable, but the interface around it should feel like a consumer payments app. Specifically for the India-first market, where the on-ramp people already trust is UPI, not a card or a wire.
Design problem statement
How do we let someone who has never held a private key buy, hold, send and swap tokens across multiple chains — without hiding the risk, and without asking them to learn a new mental model first?
The wallet is not a standalone product
This constraint shaped the architecture more than any other. YUSE is an ecosystem of roughly eight products: an NFT marketplace, Funtasy (social/messaging), YUSE Meta (metaverse), a cross-chain DEX protocol, Circle, YuPlay (gaming), Xperienz (hospitality loyalty), and an Astro app, all powered by one multi-utility token, $YUSE, on BNB Smart Chain. A Visa off-ramp card sits alongside them.
The wallet is the distribution vehicle for it all. It is where the token is acquired, held, spent, and connected to. That changes the brief in two concrete ways:
• The wallet has to be the easiest product in the ecosystem to enter, because it gates every other one. A drop-off in wallet onboarding is a drop-off across eight products, not one.
• App connection is an internal doorway, not an edge case. In most wallets, "Connect" is a power-user feature for third-party sites. Here, it's the routine handoff into the company's own products — which raises its priority and changes what the screen has to communicate (see 5.6).
The founder's stated ambition for the ecosystem was explicitly a mass-market one: easy enough for a grandparent to use. That framing set the usability bar for every screen below.
One feature that reframes the four actions
The ecosystem runs a Transact and Earn rewards layer: users accrue points on fiat-to-crypto transactions, convertible into YUSE tokens, with a minimum balance before withdrawal. At launch, it applied specifically to Buy and Swap, not Send or Receive.
This is a design input, not marketing copy. Two of the four primary actions carry a reward the user can't see anywhere in the current UI. That's addressed in Section 8.
Who it's for
Three behaviour profiles drove the decisions, not demographics:
Profile | What they want | What breaks them |
|---|---|---|
First-time owner | Buy a small amount, see it, not lose it | Seed phrase step, gas, "which network?" |
Portfolio holder | One place for assets across chains | Switching between 4 apps, blind spots on holdings |
Active trader / DeFi user | Fast swaps, dApp connections, low friction | Extra confirmation taps, CEX dependency for swaps |
“I’ve worked with many designers before, but this experience was on another level. The attention to detail and thoughtful approach made the process smooth and enjoyable.”
Natalie Brooks
Marketing Manager
Related Projects
