Design as Cross-Functional Glue in Crypto Startups

If you ask people what designers do in a crypto startup, most will say they “make things look nice.” Some will stretch it to “make products usable.” Both answers miss the point.

In crypto, the designer is not just making things usable. The designer is the glue.

The Problem of Silos

Startups already suffer from silos: engineers talk in abstractions, business teams in numbers, marketing in narratives. In crypto, it’s worse.

Now add capital markets people who think in basis points and drawdowns. Add compliance teams speaking in regulatory risk and disclosure. Add engineers building protocols in Solidity, compliance officers quoting SEC guidance, and marketers chasing memes on Twitter.

Everyone is speaking a different language.

And yet, all of them are working on the same thing: a product. A vault, a portal, a chain. The irony is that the product exists only if these groups can align.

The missing piece—the glue—is design.

Translating Worlds

When I worked on Nest, I found myself not just drawing interfaces, but translating.

Capital teams would say: This vault has $50M in TVL, but redemptions are batching at T+10 days because of liquidity buffers.

Engineering would say: We can expose the queue state via GraphQL, but indexing at block level will create data gaps.

Compliance would say: We need to disclose methodology or risk being misleading.

Marketing would say: We can’t show red numbers or users will panic.

What the user really wanted to know was simple: If I put $2M in, can I get it back out, and how long will it take?

The designer’s role was to absorb all of these inputs and then design a way to answer that user’s question truthfully, clearly, and trustworthily.

That meant turning liquidity buffers into redemption timelines. GraphQL endpoints into clean charts. Regulatory disclosures into plain-language tooltips. And even marketing fears into reframed narratives: red numbers aren’t failures, they’re signals.

Why Designers Can Do This

Why is it the designer, not the PM or the founder, who ends up doing this?

Because design has two properties no other function has:

1. It touches everything. You can’t ship a crypto product without an interface. Even if it’s “just a smart contract,” someone has to visualize the contract state for the outside world. That puts design at the center of the translation layer.

2. It is judged by clarity. Engineers are judged by correctness. Capital teams by returns. Compliance by legal defensibility. Marketing by reach. Designers are judged by clarity: Does the user understand? That makes them the natural bridge.

This doesn’t mean designers know more than other teams. It means they’re forced to understand just enough of every domain to turn it into something visible.

Lessons from Nest

At Nest, some of the biggest breakthroughs didn’t come from a new financial structuring trick or a new smart contract primitive. They came from aligning teams through design.

• Capital psychology to UI. When allocators asked, “Can I withdraw $2M tomorrow?” we translated capital team assurances into a time-to-redemption chart.

• Engineering data to observability. When engineers said, “We can index vault token balances onchain,” design turned that into real-time composition charts anyone could read.

• Compliance into trust widgets. Instead of PDFs, we embedded disclosures into interfaces—click once and see methodology, click again and see the query.

• Marketing fears reframed. Instead of hiding bad weeks, we showed them with context: “Returns dipped this week because treasury yields shifted. Historically, this stabilizes in 5 days.”

Each of these moves came from design acting as the glue—listening to each team, reframing their truths, and stitching them into a surface the user could trust.

Why Crypto Needs This More Than Web2

In Web2, you can get away with hiding complexity. Users don’t care how Uber’s matching algorithm works, or how Stripe settles funds. The job of design is to hide the machine.

In crypto, you can’t hide the machine. Transparency is the point.

Users want to see inside the vault. They want to verify yields. Regulators demand disclosures. Allocators demand observability. Retail wants simplicity.

The only way to reconcile these competing demands is progressive disclosure: multiple layers of clarity, each tailored to a different level of sophistication. This is where design earns its keep—not by flattening everything to one layer, but by stacking layers so that each persona finds their answer without losing trust.

The Designer as Glue

If you’re a designer in a crypto startup, don’t limit yourself to pixels. You are the interpreter.

When you hear capital teams debate liquidity buffers, ask: What does this mean for the user’s sense of safety?

When engineers argue about indexing strategies, ask: What does this mean for what we can display honestly?

When compliance insists on disclaimers, ask: How can we weave this into the UI instead of burying it in legalese?

When marketing wants to hide volatility, ask: What story can we tell that makes the red numbers a signal, not a failure?

The glue role is not glamorous. You’ll sit in meetings where you’re the only one connecting dots. You’ll ask “dumb” questions to experts who live in their own domains. You’ll feel like you’re outside your lane.

But this is the work. In crypto, the designer’s lane is the whole system.

Closing

Design in crypto is not just about making things pretty. It’s about making them coherent.

In startups where capital, engineering, compliance, and marketing all pull in different directions, the designer can be the only function forced to unify them.

The result isn’t just a better interface. It’s a product people trust. And in crypto, trust is the only real moat.