In 2020, Digital Surge was a pre-seed, self-funded Australian crypto exchange with three people: a CEO, a CTO, and one developer. Their product was a Webflow template connected to a crypto exchange backend. No design system. No onboarding flow. No transactional UX. Everything needed to be built — with almost no resources.
They needed a design partner who could think strategically about what to build first and execute at a senior level, without the overhead of a full-time hire or agency.
Embedded remotely with the founding team to understand the real priorities. Crypto is inherently complex — exchanges ask users to trust a platform with their money while navigating unfamiliar concepts like wallets, order books, and verification flows.
The core problem wasn't visual design. It was: how do you make a crypto exchange feel trustworthy and intuitive when your users are new to crypto and your team has three people?
With limited resources, every design decision had to earn its place. We couldn't build everything — we had to build the right things first.
Worked directly with the CEO and CTO to prioritize: onboarding flow first (the front door to the product), then core transactional flows (buy, sell, withdraw), then the broader platform experience.
The north star was simple: make it obvious. If a first-time crypto buyer can complete a purchase without confusion, the design is working.
Built the product experience from scratch:
Collaborated with the growing engineering team to ship iteratively. As the company scaled from 3 to 24 people, the design system became the shared language between design and development — enabling faster builds without sacrificing quality.
In November 2022, FTX collapsed, an $8 billion fraud that took down the world's third-largest crypto exchange. Digital Surge had over half its digital assets held on FTX. The company lost access to approximately AUD $33 million in crypto assets. Most of the 24-person team was laid off. In December 2022, Digital Surge entered voluntary administration. 22,000 customers had their assets frozen.
But Digital Surge didn't disappear. The founders put AUD $1.3M of their own money forward and proposed a rescue plan: customers with balances under $250 repaid in full immediately, all others to be made whole within five years from company profits. In January 2023, creditors overwhelmingly voted to support the plan, the first successful crypto exchange rescue in Australian history.
When the time came to rebuild, I was still there.
Six years in, the partnership is still active — and the work is better than it's ever been.
