Syndicate
UI/UX
Strategy
Research
Smart contract based collaborative investing tools
Year
2022-2023
Services
Senior designer working on a small team to define product strategy and experiences
What is Syndicate?
Syndicate is a collection of on-chain tools for coordinating capital activity and capturing on chain relationships using Ethereum smart contracts.
It does this by aggregating capital in it’s products investment clubs and deals/vaults while it represents relationships in the deals that are made with the collectives product.
Developing product directions
Initially my role was exclusively focused on developing and testing different product directions. I did this by pursuing a number of low level prototypes in order to test with key users such as high level angel investors and VCs.
We were most curious to understand what type of investment was most compelling to bring on-chain. Specifically what kind of investing behavior would create interesting social connections over time.
Capturing critical behavior
By far one of the most compelling things to capture was the behavior of investors soft committing to a deal before there was a strict lead / contract in place. This building momentum stage was critical to both founders and excited angels who wanted a deal to grow quickly.
In order to develop the concept further we built out a core interaction of pre-committing capital by locking funds in an escrow smart contract with conditional releases that an angel could have final approval on. We went through a quick series of iterations while doing research to boil down the interaction to the fundamentals.
Refinement and execution
After our validation of the direction we went into execution mode designing deal creation flows. Core to this was the ability to pre-commit to a deal as well as the tools required to manage the deal in progress for the VC who was acting as deal lead.
We designed the interactions to scale easily to mobile in order to solve for a very common behavior of angels committing to deals on their phones. Often an angel investor will join a seed deal simply because a friend recommended they do so.
Beyond deals
Once we had the deal framework designed and shipped we worked to expand our community investment tool kit. Next on our list were vaults which were using our smart contracts as a way to direct funds in charitable or non-return oriented fundraising.
This was a natural progression of our tech stack and was designed in the long run to be a financial primitive where people could even create bounties for developers to pursue within the crypto ecosystem.
