Francesco Agosti and Chris Kalani joined Phantom before the product launched.
Not as contractors brought in to polish a near-final UI. As core team — with real authority over how the product worked, not just how it looked.
That single hiring decision is why Phantom looks like Phantom. The wallet that converted more Solana users than anything else was not designed by a founder who learned Figma. It was built by a team that treated design as infrastructure from day one.
Most Web3 teams learn this lesson too late, or not at all.
What the DMs actually look like
The pattern repeats across the space.
Team raises a round. Team builds the protocol. Team hires engineers. Two weeks before mainnet, someone says: we need a designer.
They post on Twitter. They message three people from Dribbble. The good ones ignore them. Whoever is available says yes.
The brief they send looks roughly like this:
"We need something clean and minimal — like Linear, but for DeFi. Six-week timeline. USDC plus token allocation. No existing design system, just some wireframes from the founder."
The designers who receive that message — the ones with real options — have seen it before. They have also seen what follows: six weeks designing for a spec that keeps changing, a founder who wants to recreate Stripe's homepage, and a handoff to engineers who treat Figma files as rough suggestions.
They do not reply.
What Mike Demarais understood at Rainbow
Mike Demarais, one of Rainbow's co-founders, has talked about the wallet's founding philosophy in terms unusual for a crypto project: they wanted to build something people actually enjoyed using.
Not something functional. Something enjoyable.
That meant:
- Investing in motion design before Rainbow had meaningful market share
- Building a color system that communicated portfolio state at a glance
- Shipping animated transaction states with no direct conversion metric attached
- Optimizing for daily return rate, not just first-session conversion
The result: Rainbow became a reference product. Founders and designers still cite it in briefs three years later. That does not happen when design is brought in two weeks before launch.
The counterargument
Some founders push back with a reasonable point: great products have shipped with minimal design investment. Uniswap v1 had almost no UI team. Bitcoin works with a command line. The code is the product.
This is true at the protocol layer.
It stops being true the moment you are competing for consumer attention in an environment where:
- MetaMask alternatives look like banking apps
- Users have five wallet options with identical technical capabilities
- A confusing first experience loses a user permanently — there is no "forgot password" recovery
The founders who say "design comes later" are usually building for developers. Once you are building for humans, design is a go-to-market requirement, not a later-stage investment.
Why the ghosting keeps happening
The design talent problem in Web3 is structural, not attitudinal.
There is no major crypto VC firm with a design partner. There is no equivalent to what First Round Capital did for the previous generation of consumer products — where design resources and a design network were part of what the fund offered.
What VC diligence rewards in a founding team
Protocol innovation ✓
Tokenomics ✓
Go-to-market strategy ✓
Technical depth ✓
Design capability ✗
Most crypto companies raise money with no design function and no plan to build one. By the time they need it, they are in launch mode. The only option is whoever is available on short notice.
What the teams that hire well do differently
| Most crypto teams | Phantom / Rainbow / Coinbase Wallet |
|---|---|
| Hire a designer 2 weeks before mainnet | Hire when product decisions are still open |
| Give designers access, not authority | Give designers authority to change how the product works |
| Go from idea straight to implementation | Have a product process before opening Figma |
| Use contractors indefinitely | Use contractors to build a foundation, then hire |
| Brief: "clean and minimal, like Linear" | Brief: here is the problem, here is who the user is |
What this means practically
Hire before you panic. The right design hire happens when pressure is low. Design at that stage affects what you build, not just how it looks.
The brief signals the role.
Clean and minimal, like Lineartells a designer they will be decorating someone else's decisions. Show them the problem worth solving.Give authority, not just access. A designer who cannot affect product decisions is a contractor. Contractors produce deliverables. Designers produce systems.
-
The money is a threshold, not a differentiator. Once compensation clears the bar, designers are evaluating:
- Will my work matter here?
- Will this be in my portfolio in two years?
- Is this a team worth my time? Token allocations do not answer those questions.
Use contractors correctly. A contractor's output should be a foundation — a component library, documented patterns — not an infinite stream of screens that never cohere into a product.
The designers who are not responding to your DMs are not unavailable.
They are filtering for teams that treat design like infrastructure. Show them that, and the ghosting stops.
I work as a Web3 creative director helping founders build design cultures before the panic phase. somaryuu.xyz
