Lumen is a self-custodial crypto wallet designed for people who want financial sovereignty without needing to become blockchain engineers. Hold, swap, and spend onchain assets with the interaction simplicity of a banking app, and complete control over your own keys.
Self-custodial wallets have historically been the domain of users already fluent in seed phrases, gas fees, and chain-switching. The UX complexity wasn't accidental, it was inherited from the underlying technical architecture and nobody had bothered to abstract it away. Lumen's mandate was to serve the next cohort of users: people who want sovereignty over their assets but won't read a 40-page technical guide to get it.
The paradox at the centre of this project: make the most technically complex consumer financial product feel like opening a current account. The answer turned out to be progressive disclosure, not hiding complexity, but sequencing it so the user only encounters it when they're ready for it.
Self-custody means the user holds all the risk. Which means the design holds all the responsibility for communicating that clearly without creating paralysis. Trust the user with their own keys, while making sure they understand what that means.
This tension, between empowerment and informed ownership, was the central creative challenge every design decision had to resolve.
Research Insights
| Feature | MetaMask | Phantom | Rainbow | Trust Wallet | Lumen |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Non-Custodial | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-Chain | ~ | ~ | ~ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Banking-App UX | ✕ | ~ | ✓ | ~ | ✓ |
| In-App Swap | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| DeFi Yield Access | ~ | ~ | ✕ | ~ | ✓ |
| Easy Onboarding | ✕ | ~ | ✓ | ~ | ✓ |
| Open Source | ✓ | ✕ | ~ | ✕ | ✓ |
Web3 product design has a documented dark pattern problem: gas fees that appear only at confirmation, slippage hidden in small print, "confirm" buttons that look like "cancel." Lumen was designed with an explicit brief to surface total cost. Asset value plus gas, on the swap preview screen, before any commitment. That's not a nice-to-have; it's a trust foundation. The iridescent visual system communicates that this is native internet finance, not a legacy bank trying to look modern. The distinction matters to the users this product is trying to reach.
Design Highlights
Lumen, Web3 Self-Custodial Wallet UX
A cohesive design system built to communicate financial empowerment at every touchpoint. From the iridescent mesh to the amber action accent, every token was chosen to make the user feel powerful, not anxious.
Violet anchors sovereign identity. Amber warms human action. Cyan communicates the precision and speed of onchain execution. Deep void provides the infinite depth of the onchain universe.
Syne leads display with geometric confidence. Sora handles body copy with clean, universal legibility.
Lumen demonstrated that self-custody UX is a solvable problem, not through simplifying the technology, but through designing the emotional experience of key ownership with the same care as the technical execution.
"The participant in user testing who stayed with me most wasn't the DeFi native who powered through everything. It was the 35-year-old finance professional who got to the seed phrase screen, read the words 'if you lose this, no one can recover your funds,' and put the phone down. That's the exact person Lumen is for. Getting that screen right, not softening the message, but sequencing it so it felt manageable, took more work than the entire visual system combined."
"Web3 UX will be the defining design problem of the next decade. Not because the technology is complex, because the stakes of getting it wrong are so much higher than most products. Bad UX in a crypto wallet doesn't mean a bad session. It can mean permanent loss of funds. That asymmetry changes how you approach every single design decision."