Designing for Trust in Crypto

The central problem in crypto today is not yield. It’s not even regulation. It’s trust.

If you talk to people who’ve been burned by exchanges, rug pulls, or just the sheer opacity of DeFi products, you’ll hear the same thing: I don’t know what’s going on under the hood. That is the gap designers in this industry have to close.

Most people assume trust is earned through authority—regulation, logos, partnerships. In crypto, that instinct fails. Users don’t necessarily believe a PDF with a stamp on it, nor do they want to. They want the same thing engineers want from software: visibility.

The irony is that crypto already has the raw material for trust built in. Blockchains are observable by nature. But left as raw data, observability doesn’t translate into trust. Try explaining to a traditional allocator with $2 million in play that they can just “read the contracts.” You’ll lose them. What they want is simple: Show me what’s happening, and show me why I should feel safe.

Red Numbers Are Not Failures

You’d think the safe instinct to build trust is hide red numbers until you make them green. If a vault’s APY dipped below a comfortable level, obfuscate it with a better indicator. After all, who wants to market a 1% return?

But that thinking is backward. Red numbers are not failures. They’re signals. When you show them, you do two things: first, you demonstrate that you’re not trying to manipulate perception. Second, you give yourself a chance to explain why.

Hiding negatives is a bank move. It works only when there’s a human advisor to reassure you: “Don’t worry, it’s fine.” But in crypto, “don’t worry” is the worst phrase you can use. The premise of onchain finance is that I shouldn’t have to trust your word. I should be able to see for myself.

Trust Surfaces

This is why I talk about “trust surfaces.” Every product has a surface where users decide whether to lean in or pull away. In crypto, those surfaces are not just branding or copy—they are the actual financial data exposed to the user.

The most effective trust surfaces aren’t about making things look good. They’re about making things legible. When we built Nest’s internal admin panel, the most valuable thing wasn’t the pretty charts. It was the ability to see redemption queues, settlement times, liquidity buffers. In other words, the machinery. That’s when people internally began to say: “Now I actually know what’s happening.”

The leap is to take those same tools and expose them—cleanly, legibly, and without jargon—to the outside world. Trust surfaces are not marketing assets. They are operational windows turned outward.

Progressive Disclosure

The difficulty is that different users need different levels of visibility. A retail user depositing $100 wants to know “Can I redeem this quickly?” A professional allocator with $10 million wants to know why the redemption time is seven days instead of three.

The trick is progressive disclosure. Start with the headline fact—estimated time to redemption—and let the curious user drill down: historical redemption data, liquidity profile of the underlying assets, even the methodology of how prices are calculated. Each layer is a chance to build trust with a different persona.

Designing for trust means designing for both kinds of people simultaneously. Hide nothing, but don’t overwhelm.

The Problem With PDFs

Traditional finance thinks it’s being transparent when it publishes a report. The truth is, PDFs are the enemy of trust. They are static, outdated the moment they’re exported, and almost no one reads them.

Crypto products that dump 20 PDFs into a Google Drive and call it transparency are missing the point. Transparency is not about availability. It’s about legibility. If a user has to run an entire due diligence process just to understand what’s happening with their $500 stake, you’ve already failed.

The real opportunity is to make disclosures interactive. Click a number, see the query behind it. See where the data comes from. That is trust by design.

What Trust Feels Like

Trust doesn’t feel like “everything is great.” It feels like “I understand what’s happening.” That’s a subtle but crucial distinction.

The future of design in crypto isn’t just making things look easy. It’s making complexity feel navigable. It’s giving people the confidence that they can verify for themselves, even if they never actually do.

If we do this right, the trust gap narrows. Crypto won’t have to borrow credibility from regulators or celebrities. It will have its own native credibility, built not on promises, but on design.