BitDAO is an investment DAO with $3B+ in assets. Funded by ByBit, they've slowly grown into the largest treasury in crypto and have started wielding this influence by spinning up research & development labs to produce apps & protocols to support ByBit's vision. Their investments so far range from layer 2 infrastructure, gaming, education, & more with the largest being their Ethereum L2, Mantle.

I worked with the team at Windranger on a staking product for BitDAO (now known as Mantle). I designed this product alongside the ever talented Pimentel. Together we created the interface through rapid prototyping & user testing with help from Cooper & Octavio.

The $BIT token is the foundation that the BitDAO ecosystem is built on. SubDAOs (Autonomous Entities or 'AEs') are created; more products are made by these AEs; they issue utility tokens for their products; and the value captured by all those tokens flows back to original source, the $BIT token. One big, mutualistic self-referential positive feedback loop. In theory...

Stakeholders approached us with the problem of token distribution. How might we effectively ditribute tokens from new projects while reflecting the values of BitDAO and incentivizing users to hold the $BIT token? I came at it from two angles, the stakeholder problem and the user problem.

For the BitDAO core team (stakeholders), the problem was bootstrapping liquidity and making the token distribution method feel innovative. They felt that a standard ICO model for each Autonomous Entity didn't reflect BitDAO's values of mutualism. However, they also wanted to reward the members of the community that had invested the most in the $BIT token...

For $BIT holders, the problem was utility. 'Why do I need to hold the $BIT token if the projects I'm specifically interested in using has its own token?' Lurking on the community discord & telegram channel suggested this sentiment was true. We validated that intuition by interviewing community members, stakeholders, & general crypto degenerates.

We prototyped 3 hi-fi interfaces in total. Tested all of them and responded to changes in stakeholder preferences as well as community preferences. We had to walk the blurry line of being a user advocate for stakeholders who were several layers removed from the front lines of the community.

It was our job to communicate the user’s needs to the stakeholders and integrate their reaction into our product and we did it well.

After some iteration, patching early usability issues, and working with stakeholders, we felt pretty confident the solution was a batch auction. Basically, your payout is proportional to the amount you put in...

In practice, a reward pool representing a subDAO opens, users stake the $BIT tokens knowing there's a lockup period, and when the lockup period is over they receive an amount of the subDAO token calculated by their $BIT contribution in relation to the rest of the pool's total amount.

This token distribution method made sense for BitDAO's structure because of a select few community members itching to deploy an inordinant amount of capital in a *cough* fair way.

After testing we felt confident that the product was ready for release but things were in the air regarding the brand. Once it was settled, I applied the new, edgier branding (designed by Cole Jorissen) to the mockups we already had and decided to build & release. The result was a simple to use interface that stood out in relation to all the other aesthetically dull token staking interfaces that existed. Good user experience doesn't have to be ugly and it's a reinforcement of the core principles of BitDAO's brand to stand out in a crowded market.