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Kingdom Studios

Making on-chain finance feel like an adventure by building a world where every DeFi interaction has a place, a character, and a story.

ROLE

Co-Founder and Lead Product Designer

SCOPE

End-to-end product design, design system, UX strategy

PLATFORM

Web, Mobile, Wallet, NFT Marketplace

DeFi was powerful.
But inaccessible.

THE PROBLEM

By 2021, Uniswap V2 forks were everywhere. Every new DEX was functionally identical with the same token swap interface, the same liquidity pool tables, the same raw financial terminology that made sense to crypto natives and no one else.

The challenge wasn't building another DEX. It was building one that people actually wanted to spend time in. One that translated the complexity of DeFi into something intuitive, engaging, and worth coming back to.

As co-founder and lead designer, I needed to create an experience that could onboard users who had never touched DeFi, while remaining credible and functional for those who had.

"Every DeFi product looked the same. We asked: what if the interface was a world instead of a dashboard?"

DeFi (decentralized finance) lets people trade, lend, and earn on financial products directly with no bank or middleman. It runs on blockchain technology, meaning on-chain transactions happen through code rather than institutions. By 2021, it was one of the fastest-growing sectors in tech.

Translating finance into place and character.

PROCESS

Mapping DeFi to a fantasy world

Instead of pages and dashboards, every DeFi function became a zone with a purpose and a character. Users didn't navigate to a "swap" interface, they visited the NPC Matoya at the Marketplace. They didn't manage liquidity pools, they tended Seeds in the Gardens. The language of the game replaced the language of finance, lowering the barrier to entry without dumbing down the mechanics underneath.

  • The Marketplace

    TOKEN SWAPS

    Trade with Matoya, the merchant NPC

  • The Gardens

    LIQUIDITY POOLS

    Plant seeds, watch them grow.

  • The Jeweler

    STAKING

    Deposit tokens, earn tokens

  • The Docks

    CROSS-CHAIN BRIDGING

    Partner bridges brought into the world

Screenshot 2026-03-09 at 4.52.49 PM.png

Solving the bridging problem

Cross-chain bridging was one of the biggest friction points in DeFi where users had to leave the platform, find a third-party bridge, and navigate back. We made partnerships with bridge providers and brought them directly into the game world as the Docks zone. Users could bridge their assets without ever leaving the experience, with the same visual language and character interactions as the rest of the platform.

This dramatically reduced drop-off at the critical onboarding step.

Building the design system from zero

With a platform spanning web, mobile, wallet, and marketplace, consistency is non-negotiable. While the phenomenal nostalgic pixel art is done by talented pixel artists, the design system architecture consists of design tokens, UI components, interaction patterns, and a scalable front-end component library.

The system accommodates both the fantasy visual language of the game world and the precise functional requirements of financial interfaces: real-time data, transaction states, wallet connections, and error handling.

From launch to $1B market cap in 4 months.

OUTCOMES

Aug ‘21

LAUNCH

Went live with Marketplace, Gardens, and Jeweler on the blockchain. Immediate traction from the first week.

161%

DEC 2021 WALLET GROWTH IN 14 DAYS

Unique wallets engaging with DeFi Kingdoms grew 161% in just two weeks in December 2021, driven by word-of-mouth and the differentiated experience.

$1B+

MARKET CAP BY DEC 2021

The token reached a $1B market cap and the platform was cited alongside Axie Infinity as one of the two biggest crypto games in the world.

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CONTACT

Let's make
something great.

Maye is a product designer based in Maui designing intuitive experiences for complex products, with deep expertise in UX, design systems, and interaction design.

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