Plume Portal: Turning Infrastructure into an Ecosystem

Context

When you build a blockchain, you don’t just build infrastructure. You need a place where people actually see and feel it. With Plume, that place became the Portal.

The goal of the Portal was simple: to become the front door of the ecosystem. The place you land when you want to know what Plume is about, what assets you can access, and how you can get started. If Nest was about showing institutions that real-world assets can live onchain, the Portal was about showing everyone else that crypto can feel approachable and rewarding.

What makes the Portal different is that it wasn’t designed as another app. It was designed as the discovery and engagement layer across all of Plume. A single surface where balances, quests, points, and streaks come together into a narrative about your place in the ecosystem.

For me, that meant focusing less on infra and more on psychology. What gets someone to connect their wallet? What keeps them coming back? How do you turn abstract metrics—TVL, staking streaks, Plume Points—into something that feels like progress? Those were the questions behind the Portal.

The Challenge

One of the problems with ecosystems is that they sprawl. You launch a vault here, a staking app there, a leaderboard somewhere else, and before long the user has to juggle six tabs just to figure out what’s going on. Plume was no different.

Users didn’t have a single place to see what they owned. Their balances were scattered across apps. Engagement was opaque—points, streaks, referrals all existed, but there was no clear way to track them. And onboarding was a mess. If you landed on Plume as a new user, it wasn’t obvious what to do first. Bridge funds? Stake? Explore vaults? There was no path.

The result was a gap. People showed up, but they didn’t always know how to start. And even if they did, there wasn’t much to keep them coming back. Without a discovery layer, the ecosystem felt fragmented. Without an engagement layer, it felt static.

The Portal had to solve both at once.

The Solution

The Portal wasn’t just another app. It was the entry point and compass for the Plume ecosystem. The job was to take a set of scattered mechanics—balances, points, streaks, quests—and turn them into something coherent. Here are some of the mechanics I focused on.

Homepage after connecting

The first screen after connecting your wallet had to answer the simplest but most important question: what do I own here? We built a connected homepage that summarized wallet balances and ecosystem activity at a glance. Instead of overwhelming users with options, we set one clear call-to-action at a time—stake, explore, or level up—while keeping a few secondary paths available. It gave the user direction without boxing them in.

Quests

Engagement in crypto usually looks like buttons and numbers. We wanted something closer to a narrative. Quests became that format: a way to package disparate activities across apps into storylines like “earn real world yields.” The design had to teach, guide, and reward all at once. Quests explained the why, nudged the how, and closed the loop with points and badges.

User Profile + Wallet

In Web3 your identity isn’t your username, it’s your wallet. We designed the profile page to reflect that. Instead of separating profile and wallet into two surfaces, we unified them. Profiles showed balances, points, streaks, and achievements in one place. The message was clear: who you are in Plume is what you’ve done and what you hold.

Design Principles

Good design isn’t just about adding features. It’s about choosing the few principles that everything else bends around. For the Portal, three principles mattered more than anything:

Simplicity
Infrastructure is complex. Wallets, staking, cross-app rewards—they’re not things a normal user should have to think about. The goal was to abstract them into approachable flows. One button. One main action. Everything else hidden until it mattered.

Visibility
Crypto hides the very things that keep people engaged. Streaks, points, TVL—they exist, but usually in spreadsheets or backend logs. We pulled them out and made them visible. A streak counter you could watch climb. Points that updated in real time. TVL shown not as an abstract number but as part of your story in the ecosystem. Visibility turned invisible mechanics into motivational hooks.

Cohesion
The ecosystem was fragmented. Each app had its own entry point, its own interface, its own story. The Portal stitched them together into one experience. Balances, quests, achievements—all surfaced in one place. What was once a collection of apps began to feel like an ecosystem.

Outcomes

The Portal worked. It became the default hub for onboarding and daily engagement across Plume. When new users asked “where do I start?”, the answer was no longer a Discord link or a scattered set of dapps—it was the Portal.

By giving people a clear window into their own activity, the Portal also strengthened the trust surface. Wallet balances, streaks, and points weren’t hidden in some backend table; they were surfaced right where users could see them. Transparency made people feel in control.

The engagement layer—quests, streaks, leaderboards—turned passive users into repeat users. What began as infrastructure became habit-forming.

And maybe most importantly, the Portal showed what design could do for Plume. It proved that design wasn’t just decoration for infra. It could take complex mechanics, wrap them in a story, and make them human. It could make the ecosystem feel alive.

Visit the Plume Portal at portal.plume.org.