Case study · Osmosis Labs
Polaris
Every token, every chain, one app. Built for more than 50,000 traders who were tired of juggling five tools to do one thing.
A portal, not another exchange
one app for every chain
Polaris is a token portal: an aggregator that sits on top of the exchanges, bridges and wallets that already exist and turns them into a single app that does not care which chain you are on. Pick a token, and it finds the route. Bring the wallet you already have.
It was one of the first products of its kind, so there was no pattern to borrow. The design team was two people: the lead designer, who was my boss, and me right behind them, shaping the news, trading and portfolio surfaces and running the research.
The problem
Crypto is scattered by default.
- Several wallets
- Different networks
- Portfolio trackers
- Trading apps
- News and sentiment sites
Nobody had shipped the all-in-one version yet, so there was no pattern to borrow. We were inventing it as we went, carefully, with real money on the line.
Research that stuck
the Airtable era
I interviewed beginners entering crypto, investors coming from traditional finance, active traders who wanted automation, and crypto-natives working across chains.
Then I built an Airtable system to hold every piece of feedback, so recurring pain points stayed visible to the whole team long after the calls ended. Three themes won:
- Too many tools
- Too much noise
- No view of everything I own
Three surfaces, one system
each works alone
Polaris stands on three surfaces: market intelligence, trading, and the portfolio. Each had to work on its own and still feel like one product, so moving between them never felt like changing apps.
- Market intelligence
- Trading
- Portfolio
News that keeps up
no more twelve tabs
Crypto moves on narrative, and people were leaving the app to keep up. I designed the News and For You experience to bring that inside.
A personal For You feed, a Following tab for the assets you track, article cards built for scanning, and signal cards that flag sentiment, big moves and what is trending.
Trading across chains
no network switching
Search any asset, see how it is doing, and trade it in one place without switching networks or tools. The trading screen combines price analytics, live charts, cross-network route discovery, balance awareness, and a preview before every trade.
A portfolio with a privacy switch
for trading in cafés
Connect your wallets and see balances, performance and history together, with no separate tracker. One small feature people loved: privacy mode, which hides your balances with a tap when someone is looking over your shoulder.
Owning QA
the unglamorous bit
I also led product QA. In crypto the edge cases are the product, so I validated interface states, walked every trading flow for the weird cases, caught usability issues before release, and kept news, trading and portfolio consistent with the design system.
Complex systems don’t have to feel complicated. When the structure is clear, everything moves faster.still true