Building vVv

Making a genuinely complex capital-formation platform legible, and making backing an ecosystem feel like belonging to one.

vVv is a capital-formation platform: the layer between emerging crypto ecosystems and the people who back them early. For three years I was Head of Design and, in practice, the one-person design function — shaping the product, the brand and the launch from the ground up.

It was two hard problems at once. Capital formation is dense by nature: allocations, vesting, node economics, and a wall of legal constraint around moving real money early. And it lived or died on community. Get either half wrong and there is no product.

The problem: make something complex feel like somewhere you belong

The norm in the space was cold and transactional — a professional, buttoned-up launchpad you used and left. The bet was the opposite: could a dense, community-run financial product become something people took personally, an identity they were proud to hold rather than a tool they logged into?

That reframed the job. Not only ‘make the numbers legible’ — we did that too — but ‘make backing an ecosystem feel like joining a collective worth belonging to.’

The rebrand: from professional to aspirational

We moved the brand off the polished corporate default toward something aspirational with a slight underdog edge: a collective of people levelling up, many of whom had already achieved real success. The through-line was self-improvement — back early, rise together.

Under it sat a design system built from the ground up to carry a complex product: a full component library, complete state coverage, and one visual language that held across the platform, the brand and the launch campaign.

The mechanic: an identity you earn

The identity wasn’t decoration — you earned it. Two moves turned participation into progress.

Chips before tokens. A campaign layer let people earn ‘chips’ before any token existed: a way in that rewarded early engagement and built real stake before there was anything to buy.

Profile pictures you level up. Chips upgraded your PFP into higher, more powerful tiers — a visible rank that turned quiet participation into status. Levelling up wasn’t a feature bolted on; it was one of the brand’s core values, made literal.

The platform underneath

Beneath the brand ran a genuinely dense product. A pipeline that readied backers for a deal and let them pledge a contribution in a few clean steps. A raffle-and-reward system engineered to work inside real legal constraints — the hard part in this space. A node system. And a launchpad with a yielding narrative and mechanic that rode the moment; built in collaboration with an outside studio, it raised $1.5M.

The result

Across three years the work was validated by the company it kept and the capital it moved: $5M raised, more than $10M in AUM, 6,000+ Discord members, and 1,000 users in the first 24 hours of launch — $1.5M of it through the launchpad we designed. Ecosystem partnerships followed with Avalanche, Peaq, Outlier, Abstract and Xverse.

The transferable part isn’t the token mechanics. It’s the pairing: a complex financial product made legible, wrapped in an identity people genuinely wanted to belong to. Belonging did the work most acquisition budgets can’t.

Role: Head of Design, covering platform, brand, identity systems and launch.