Our Hopes and Dreams for Bitcoin Design
Just a Lil Bitcoin Product Blog #3.
If there’s anything the Spiral Product Team loves, it’s bitcoin, good design, and gratuitous blog posts. In this lengthy but pivotal piece, Mat Balez and Conor Okus outline a few long-term plans to grow the influence and impact of the Bitcoin Design Community.
From the beginning, one of Spiral’s aims has been to dramatically improve bitcoin’s design by making it simpler, more usable, and even beautiful.
A new digital money the whole world wants to have and use every day.
Instead of hiring an in-house designer to toil away towards these aims, Spiral created the Bitcoin Design Community, a way for hundreds of designers worldwide, including product folks like us, who care deeply about bitcoin to come together to discuss and design out in the open.
This Bitcoin Design Community has since celebrated 5 years of work in the bitcoin space. In that time, the Community has created an extensive Design Guide, hosted nearly a hundred open design reviews, sponsored new designers coming into bitcoin, organized design-a-thons, hosted a Bitcoin Design Week in San Francisco just last month, and much more. We’ve been busy.
This is good momentum. But like bitcoin itself, we see improving design in the bitcoin space as a multi-decade endeavor, one that we’re still in the early innings of. Halfway into our first decade, it feels like a good time to ask the question: what are our hopes and dreams for the Bitcoin Design Community over the next 5 years and beyond?
Put simply: our single biggest hope is for the Design Community to make a bigger dent in the bitcoin universe (and in the regular universe too). To make a giant impact at bitcoin’s already gigantic scale.
To get there, we’ll need to attract more world-class designers who care about lasting impact—the kind who create work that moves industries and lasts generations.
We see two main areas in which design can make a much bigger dent: the first is in product-building (obviously), the second is in culture-building (perhaps less obviously).
Let’s start with the less obvious: culture-building.
Culture is disproportionately important because it influences politics, attitudes, participation, and, ultimately, usage. Improve the culture, and everything else improves. That’s leverage.
In bitcoin, the Design Community’s role has naturally gravitated towards the design of the tech and corresponding products. Yet we think there’s an opportunity to do much more even before the product funnel—operating upstream in the land of perception.
Zooming out, bitcoin has long suffered from a branding problem.
It’s a bit ironic, in fact, because it has achieved the improbable by becoming a globally recognized brand despite this. Almost everyone’s heard of bitcoin and almost everyone knows how valuable it is. That’s wild.
So the problem is less about recognition than what follows the recognition—often negative sentiment resulting from a combination of misunderstanding or false narratives. It is too often lumped in with other cryptocurrencies and the sketchy pump-and-dump practices that accompany them. It is seen as overly technical, too politically tribal, too masculine, too speculative, and too off-putting.
The vast majority of normal people still roll their eyes whenever someone brings up bitcoin.
All of these shortcomings are shortcomings of perception that belie the real and inspiring fact that bitcoin is a technology predicated on financial empowerment, neutral governance, human freedom, and social good—individually and collectively.
Yet the persistent negative stereotypes that repel users also repel builders and new designers from coming into the community. So if we want to start with attracting more—and more experienced—designers to the Bitcoin Design Community, it all needs to begin with updating bitcoin’s brand image.
The Design Community can help make the case for why the world should care about bitcoin.
There are many ways to approach this. It will take new, entrepreneurial thinking. We can create more inspiring visuals and stories, surface real examples, and amplify them. We can draw from modern art and experimental design leaders like Block’s Kyle Fletcher. We can collect great work into an open brand guide, push new bitcoin narratives beyond finance, and build bridges to unrelated industries and communities. We can find creative ways to fund campaigns—and even smarter ways to spread ideas without funding.
Does this border on marketing work for bitcoin? Sure—brand design and marketing are always inextricably linked, but this is just an argument to encourage brand designers and marketers in the community to do more together.
As the tent gets bigger, there’s more room not just for people, but for more ideas. So let’s start hatching new plans in the community Discord’s new #brand channel.
But of course design must also shape real products.
Culture matters, but the most direct way designers can shape bitcoin’s future is by improving the software that the next billion people will actually use.
The mission here has always been clear: 1) share best practices for designing against the unique challenges of bitcoin, 2) drive consistency in a decentralized ecosystem, and 3) accelerate product building across the industry. And this work should be done out in the open, in line with bitcoin’s open-source ethos.
The Bitcoin Design Guide, assembled over many years of research and meticulous documentation, is the first and primary asset the Community has produced to push towards this goal. And it’s a solid foundation.
But we want to dream bigger. How might the Guide, with all its helpful guidance, become an essential resource, something that touches and helps all product building in the space?
One way is by embracing the changing nature of how new products are built. AI is reinventing development and design, so we should explore how to optimize the Design Guide for AI coding tools and serve a new wave of designer-builders (aka vibecoders) who can rapidly prototype ideas and iterate towards product-market fit. We’re excited by the emergence of the Bitcoin Builder Kit, which bakes design best practices into actual code samples and working components that quickly bring “great bitcoin UX” to life. We hope to see all kinds of new experimentation on this AI-enabled frontier, as the lines between “designer” and “engineer” become increasingly blurred.
Another way this could happen is by seeking out and embracing the industry designers who are working in the trenches of bitcoin product building, serving real users. The Guide, and the Design Community more generally, should be a practical and helpful forum for such designers in big and small ways. Maybe this means helping to translate theory and abstract design into custom design systems and real product flows? Or creating easier ways of getting quick feedback and questions answered? Or by celebrating the best shipping designs that exemplify the Design Guide in practice? There’s also something to be done to encourage more cross-pollination amongst designers and build relationships in new places like popular crypto exchanges and custodians who have massive userbases, and thus influence.
Another path to greater impact is to empower a team to turn the Guide into a living, best-in-class reference wallet—one that sets a new standard for bitcoin user experience. The best, most useful mobile self-custodial spending wallet for the masses doesn’t yet exist. We’d love to work with developers and teams to make it real.
But it can’t end with expecting builders to come to the Design Community.
Bitcoin designers also need to get out there.
To have massive influence on real world product development, designers in the bitcoin community need to become active—maybe even provocative—advocates for great design on social media and other public forums where influence is peddled. This means finding product discussions and contributing to them with the voice of the user in mind and an inclination towards beauty and simplicity. This will also mean firing up new discussion with a forward-thinking mindset. Let’s create a design culture, an appreciation for what great design means in bitcoin, among developers. If not the Bitcoin Design Community, then who?
Lastly, we believe there are still unexplored use cases that might be enabled by the unique properties of bitcoin as a borderless, permissionless money for all parts of the world. We think bitcoin can be more than just savings and payments in the traditional sense. Bitcoin and the coming of superhuman agentic AIs present a new frontier of Human and Computer Interaction design opportunities. Suddenly, value can be locked, unlocked, and flow in entirely new ways between humans, businesses, and machines—all without intermediaries. We imagine new social networks, new ways to communicate, new forms of microtransactions, new identity systems, and new commerce. All kinds of new sources of demand for—and use of—bitcoin await discovery.
The Bitcoin Design Community can lead this creative charge.
Researching, experimenting, and prototyping to sniff out how these new frontiers may be the way forward for the industry. Helping to spawn a massive, so far unimagined, way for bitcoin to empower humans would be a universe-sized dent worth making.
So if you’re an amazing brand designer, savvy brand marketer, seasoned bitcoin industry designer, vibe coder extraordinaire, experienced product designer, or just a design appreciator with great taste and lots of energy who wants to reinvent the way money works, we’d like your help shaping the next half decade of the Bitcoin Design Community.
There are grants available for impactful work, new jobs waiting to be created, and an activated community with a full head of steam to jump into. Us Spiral PMs are planning to spend a bunch more time in the coming months helping to energize and grow things—if you’re as excited as we are, we’d love to hear from you. Our DMs are open.