Designing crypto products for investors & communities - with Liam Murphy

Welcome to the Product Bakery podcast. I'm here today with my dear co-host Alex and a good friend, Liam Murphy. Hi, Christian. Hi, Liam. So it's a very special moment again. And I think we had some pretty nice guests already. But I think having Liam sitting here is especially great because he was like my first hire when we worked together at SumUp. Liam has an industrial design background. And after that, he had some projects that he was running with a friend of his and simultaneously was working at Intercom as a design recruiter. And yeah, we worked together at SumUp. And after that experience, he moved on, focusing on cryptocurrency, especially like donuts. But maybe you can tell us a little bit more, especially like how you got into cryptocurrency and how your first experience there was. Yeah, sure. It's actually funny that you mentioned the whole SumUp thing. I think it was my first proper job in the design space. You just reminded me about it. But yeah, talking about crypto, it's something that I was pretty involved in, not in a professional way, but it was more of a hobby of mine, being involved in that in some way for some time. I think it's probably about eight years or so now that I've been exposing myself to the crypto space in some way. I started out with kind of mining crypto, as a lot of people did eight years ago, back when I guess Bitcoin was probably about 100 euro. And I think at the time, it was 100. And I looked at other crypto assets. I was like, why would I mine Bitcoin as 100 euro when I can mine this other coin? That's one euro. And let's say that was a pretty big mistake. But anyway, moving on, I spent a lot of time in various tech companies. And now, now I get the kind of opportunity to focus more on the crypto space. Most recently at Donut, where I was pretty focused on consumer crypto products, enabling more people to invest in Bitcoin and interact with decentralized finance, which I guess is something that we can probably talk about in a little more detail. And then most recently, again, I've moved on to focus more on more open source crypto projects. I'm not really working full time on anything right now. But I'm giving myself the time and space to delve a bit deeper into, let's say, the kind of deep tech aspects of crypto, and trying to bring a bit more kind of product design consideration to that space. Maybe to get started a little bit on the whole crypto space. And I have to admit, even if we had a lot of conversation around the crypto space, to me, it's still this massive black box where I don't really believe that I understand what it really is. Maybe you can give us like a little bit of a quick introduction into the space. And once you do this, Liam, I want to make a lot of money in a very short time. So please help us out. If you'd listened to me in the first place, you'd all be very rich right now. Neither of you would be working, you wouldn't have to do this podcast anymore. You'd be in a good place. Yeah, I still remember our first conversations, actually. It's the same problem, right? You listen to people and it all sounds smart, but then you're like, yeah, no, but I don't understand. I don't understand it. And that was my and still is my biggest problem. I'm not invested in any sort of cryptocurrency because it's just, yeah, it's black box. I wish I would have bought Bitcoin when it was 100 years. I think the interesting thing now is we're going previously crypto is really abstract. So you have a bunch of different protocols all competing to be this top dog in the space. So Bitcoin is obviously this number one asset that everyone knows about. Your parents probably know about it. Your grandparents might have even heard about it. But we're moving into this kind of new era in crypto where we're in a position where we have this, I guess the primary one is Ethereum. And Ethereum is nurturing this new ecosystem called DeFi or decentralized finance. And that is where things get a little less abstract, because really what decentralized finances is trying to do is to basically create or recreate all of the kind of financial structures we have now, but in a decentralized way, decentralized being that no one person has control over it. No one has control over your assets. It's all community driven and they all a lot of them have a kind of governance built in, which means as a holder of this and as a believer in it, you can actually vote on what you think should happen next. And if you can get the people behind you to make that change, it can happen and it can happen in a short space of time. So it's building out the kind of base layer right now where we have things like loaning platforms that are really popular than any possible thing in the current traditional financial markets. It will eventually be replicated in decentralized finance. And over the last eight years, how did you see this whole crypto space also getting more traction with consumers and do you feel like it actually will become more and more popular? Maybe even at one point, I think this is something that many people often discuss, especially if you don't fully understand what crypto is. Will it at one point replace some fiat currencies? So I don't. It's funny because I think at the beginning, that's what a lot of people believed and what a lot of people were striving for. I think the interesting thing with consumers is that it's very difficult to change their behavior and you really need good incentives to do that. So the biggest incentive for a lot of people is making money, making free money. So I would definitely say over the last year, that's what's pulled a lot more people in is these new wave of savings accounts, let's say. And basically what it lets you do is take something like U.S. dollars, like your normal U.S. dollars, and earn interest on that by providing it into a pool of other people's assets. So all three of us could take our money and put it into this protocol. Basically what's happening is on the other side, someone is borrowing those assets and they're secure, they're collateralized. So the people on the other side have to put money in before they can borrow. But it means for people like you and me, the simple act of putting money in means we can earn a variable interest rate between 2% and 20%, which is something that obviously in normal traditional bank accounts just isn't possible. And even I think in Germany, in some banks, you're going to be paying to keep your money in those bank accounts, like negative interest. So that is probably one of the bigger things that I can see drawing more people into the space and definitely has. And that's actually something at Donut that we really focused on as a core functionality in our product, was basically making that even more streamlined and making it so that you literally connect your bank account, deposit money, and it's earning interest immediately. As a designer with the mission of Donut, making it more accessible, what does it mean or how is it to design for such a, in its basics, pretty complicated topic as like cryptocurrencies and trying to make them easy to understand? How did you approach it? What was your process to go about it? One of the biggest things that we really did, and for context, Donut was a product focused on the US market, very much focused on California as our kind of primary launch location. At the beginning, it was really a lot of talking to people, especially being European, who's lived in Europe for a long time, my whole life. Finances are a bit different in the US, I guess people are a bit more happy to accept some level of risk and invest a bit more. You have things like the 401k in the US, which is basically, everyone has basically a pension scheme set up of sorts that basically they're investing in stocks and bonds automatically through the government schemes. So it's more intertwined with the kind of fabric of their life. Things like that were big things we really had to learn a bit more about. So we really, very early on, I think in the first month of me working at Donut, I went to Los Angeles for two weeks to basically just interview and user test in parallel out there. So the beginning was building a lot of context around what kind of characters are out there, how they think about money, how they think about investment. And then taking those learnings, injecting that into some prototypes, and trying to capitalize on some of the learnings there. Crypto is generally to me still a niche, I would say. To me, it would be interesting to know what is the kind of persona that is using crypto products? Because when I look at a couple of crypto apps that I just tried out, and I'm passively using, there are these crazy interfaces where I really have no idea what I should press and how I can derive if something makes sense to buy or not. So what kind of people are using crypto first of all, and how do you make based on these decisions to design the way you design? That's an interesting one. I guess the number one kind of person that's doing it is someone who's already in the crypto space and is just really interested in all of the innovation happening there. So that one's obvious and very clear. That's the kind of niche group. Is this a kind of prerequisite? What do you mean, sorry? When you design crypto products, you are always assuming that these people are already in the crypto area? Or do you consider also being friendly for people who just want to get started? So I guess that's the interesting part. And that's what I was going to jump on next. That's the initial kind of user that would be using crypto. The difficult part and the thing we were trying to solve at Donut was really we were trying to make it as simple as possible and get in any sort of consumer and really make it accessible to the average person. So, for instance, I think at the beginning, we wanted it to be an app that your mom could use and her first way to get involved in buying Bitcoin and getting involved in savings with decentralized finance. So that was the kind of struggle, or I guess still is the struggle in generally in the crypto spaces. Everyone wants to shift these people, these average consumers into the space. I don't feel like anyone's really cracked it yet. And it's clear, right? Like most people just aren't engaged in any sort of crypto products. But that's the struggle. And that's really what we're trying to push through in this space. Can you make an example on something that you try to, how you try to crack on the kind of feature or kind of functionality in the app that you thought would maybe be sensible to be adjusted that, for example, a mom could use this kind of product? Yeah, so the number one thing we tried to do there was, so we released this feature called collect change. And basically, the idea around that was, it's something that I guess some people are familiar with, they've probably seen it in other fintech apps. But basically, what it does is it rounds up your spare change from payments made on your card, and it automatically invests that into Bitcoin. That was the first thing that we did to try and bring more of those users in. And there was a positive response. The thing about Donut was, it was still to this day, I guess, pretty early on in its life. But at that point, it was even earlier, it's only, it's only really been out for nine months at this point. So it's still very early days. But definitely, that was something people really enjoyed and allowed them to get in easier and expose themselves. And anyone who'd done that from day one, continue to do that, or the majority of users continue to do that. The majority of them are in, you know, a better financial place right now, just because Bitcoin since then has gone up considerably in value. But this whole concept was around the idea of dollar cost averaging. So with traditional investments, you're oftentimes taking hundreds, thousands, whatever it is, whatever you have to invest, and you're putting it in and hoping that you got in at the right time. And that that whatever you invested in doesn't crash. And the whole, that was another thing that we wanted to do to bring more of the users in, separate them from the risk and say, all you're going to be doing is putting in a couple of dollars every week. If it crashes, you're going to keep buying it. And it means you're buying at a lower price. So you're not really exposing yourself to massive risk in that process. That was really our thesis on trying to get people in. I would say it was successful. In general, like, people definitely become more comfortable with it. Okay, gotcha. Would you say bigger investors or especially like a target audience that has more funds available to really go big in on cryptocurrency would tendentially go for a more complex product because they then also have like more context? Or are they simply not really served by current products on the market? The interesting thing is, and I actually have anecdotes from user testing here where one user signed into the Roundup thing that started ranting up their change, investing in Bitcoin. And they actually said in the interview, that was their first ever time buying Bitcoin. But then once they became more familiar with it, more comfortable with the idea, eventually, they did more research. And they looked at, for instance, things like fees, things around how much they're getting for their investment. And for that particular user, and I guess for others probably as well, it meant that they then shifted to different products. They found the product that allowed them to put a larger amount of money in and keep the majority of that without losing any fees. That's a good example where once someone got more serious, they actually shifted away from the product, which was interesting. Circling a little bit back, I would be also interested how you approach the whole topic of kicking this product off at all. Especially when it comes to investing, I would imagine that, let's say the older people would be maybe hesitant using an app instead of a web interface. Maybe you can share a little bit what made you decide to go with an app first. It's important for people to know that Donut is an app. And how are the plans to moving further to a web interface? A big part of that is, and while I said that we wanted people's mom to be able to invest, we definitely were never specifically targeting people in the older age demographic. We really were targeting more Gen Z, millennial age groups. And just by the nature of that, the majority of us now as millennials or Gen Z, when we're interacting with finances, we're interacting with those in our phone. I don't remember the last time personally I went onto a website to send money to someone or to do anything with my money. I'm not sure about you two. But yeah, that was really, we felt that that wasn't something we really needed to delve into just by that very nature, that it felt like that's where things are now. We definitely experimented with a signup on web, where we would allow people to start that process on the web and then finish the signup process on the phone, for instance. That was something I wasn't so involved in as a member on the team. So again, don't have any numbers on that to share. But yeah, definitely something that I think was relatively successful on that side. And speaking also about the early days, I remember when you joined Donut, you also spent quite some time working with the whole topic of branding and positioning of the company. Maybe you can just tell us a little bit more about that specific part and how you also picked your target or the way you want to target your audience. That was the first time that I'd ever really been fully involved in kind of brand work. My role, I was collaborating with an agency and another small studio, both in the UK. And really, the whole idea behind it was, as I said, we're targeting kind of younger audiences. But again, it was this consumer product. We're familiar with a lot of financial products having a very kind of serious look, especially in the crypto space, often going for these kind of blues and purples. That was something that we were very clear that we wanted to avoid at the beginning. We wanted to differentiate ourselves. And really with the brand tone of voice and everything, we wanted that to feel very welcoming and even at times charming and maybe a bit of humor in there. But it was always, I guess there's always like this kind of balance you have to strike between bringing these humorous elements in and still remembering that you're handling people's money and you can't go too far down that road. We were really trying to bring, be as welcoming as possible, be as open to a diverse group of people as possible. And yeah, we went down the kind of interesting route of working with this small studio to develop real plasticine stop motion characters. The kind of feeling there was that millennials would probably be familiar with that somehow, maybe bringing in some element of nostalgia there, trying to gravitate, trying to get those users to gravitate a little bit more towards our brand. By the way, I really can only tell people to really have a look at the branding. It was a really nice work and definitely like also in the community. I think we're talking about early last year of 2019, right? There were not so many companies already like in this kind of space or art direction. So definitely recommend to check it out. You said at the beginning that it's hard to change behavior, especially now where crypto becomes more and more consumer facing. My question is, apart from this kind of initiatives you drive by auto investing, etc. What are current trends you see that are popping up more and more or that people are jumping onto? For me, I'm inside of the bubble, especially right now. So there's kind of two sides. And I'd like to say that there's a crossover there where there's definitely, I personally see more consumers like jumping into the space. And I would still say it's niche. But I definitely see more consumers coming in where there's this craze going on in the crypto space where basically there's because everything's like open source and decentralized. People can release something within a day. And a big craze that's been happening is these things where they're like food tokens. So for instance, there's one called sushi swap. And there's another one called someone like forked that and called it sashimi swap. So there's like these crazy things and it happens like for me, it feels like some of the stuff happened six months ago, but it was only three weeks ago. And we've gone through this crazy phase where people are doing this thing called yield farming. And basically what it is, you take tokens and you place them into this smart contract. And basically what it does is providing people with tens of thousands of percent APR on their money. So they're putting money in and they're earning in a day, you're earning more on what you put in than you would earn in your traditional bank account. Like people are earning like 70% on their money in a day or two. What is the business model behind that? The business model is basically, so these tokens, every time one of these projects launches, they're releasing their own token. And the business model is that they are putting their token out there. And for you to receive the highest interest rate, you're having to buy their token to do that. So the model is you're buying the token that's raising the price or the value of each one of those tokens. And the team has probably 10 to 20% of the token allocation and they leave the rest for users to like yield farm, which is this thing I mentioned. So that's basically the business model. And a lot of them are very short sighted. It's not like long term business models, but it's a really dangerous and scary place to be as well because this term rug pull is a thing that's around. Rug pull is basically where you jump into one of these projects and then the people that created it pull the metaphorical rug from everyone that's there and just take all the money with them. You have to be really careful in that side of crypto. So that's why it's difficult to even advise or tell anyone to do that kind of thing. But yeah, I guess there is some crossover with I see more consumers coming in with those crazy potential returns. So people watch a YouTube video and then they decide to buy? Yeah, I'm not even sure how much people are sharing on YouTube. That's the interesting part. It's this underground thing where people are in like telegrams or discord channels. And that's where a lot of this kind of information is spreading. Another question or another aspect that I'm curious about is we look now pretty much deep into the consumer side. I'm pretty sure there is maybe another side for the heavy users. What's going on there? And how are you doing any project in this kind of area? I'm involved with a few things like just part time helping out with stuff. It's very, I guess it's a very community driven space. People do things without the promise of being paid. People do things because they're interested in it. I guess for a lot of people, it's somewhat of a hobby as well as a potential career opportunity moving forward. There is a lot more deep tech and it touches on this whole DeFi aspect where people are trying to build these decentralized finance products from the ground up. I actually saw a good analogy on Twitter where someone, I guess this might help contextualize some of it. We're probably all familiar with these like NPM packages when you're starting a new project and you're trying to get the basic functionality you want into a project, you use like some NPM packages, you pull those in. And basically, when you're building a project in crypto and DeFi, bringing in something like allowing people to trade different currencies, like the stock market or allowing someone to take a loan or do any of those things. If I wanted to build a project in the space, adding those functionalities to my product is essentially pulling in NPM packages so I can get these crazy functionalities without any permission, without anyone telling me what I can or can't do and basically instantly. I don't know if that helps contextualize it, but that's a way to help people understand what's happening in this space. People are essentially building this base layer that will allow anyone to build any financial product they want. Coming from having worked or currently working with a lot of financial, let's say more traditional financial technology companies where pretty much everything is super regulated. How regulated is cryptocurrency? Yeah, that rug pull term is testament to the fact that there's zero regulation. The three of us could decide to build something tonight. Let's do it! Yeah, but there's been literally projects that launch and the same day they have close to one billion dollars locked in their platform from people getting involved straight away. And then they disappear. Some of them do, some of them have. It reminds me also on this big bubble we had in 2001. So is this kind of similar that you have this overvalued cryptos appearing? Do you mean 2008 like in the normal financial market? No, the 2001 when we had the dot-com bubble. Oh, I gotcha. So everything was overvalued. Is this a kind of similar trend that you see in crypto? So there's something new, it spreads, it goes viral, people push it up by buying? Maybe even more than that. How is it even valued? And I think that's something I always struggle to understand. If you say, okay, someone launches a new coin or something, the initial price per coin, where does the value come from? Because we're not fiat currencies that are based on, I don't know, gold value whatsoever and regulated. Yeah, so it's interesting. A lot of the time, like traditionally, or I guess you can't say traditionally because a lot of these things are only like a year or two old. But in my world, that's traditionally. Basically, like projects would define the initial price themselves. So you probably remember this ICO era where projects were launching. It was like, this is the price per token, give us that money and then you get the tokens. That was the old way. And the new way is this way of like fair distributions. And that is like zero price. So the way that they do it is they just, so this yield farming thing, for instance, this is how they do it fairly. So for instance, a project will say, we're not keeping any of these tokens. Anyone who wants to earn these tokens can put their money in and earn that as interest, basically. And they're just earning those tokens. And that in itself allows a wide range of people to start basically creating these tokens out of nothing. And over time, within no time, basically values itself. A lot of the time, these projects go up exponentially straight away. So it's usually the people who get in earlier are the ones that are making money on this. But a lot of, as I said, the whole idea of this is that they're decentralized. No one should have control. The project founders don't have control. And by starting to own these tokens and claim them, you're becoming one of the people at the table who makes the decisions about what happens next with this project. What would a simple project look like? If you say project, what could this be? One of them, for instance, could be an insurance product. You want insurance on your assets. You want insurance on against hacks, for instance, or anything like that. One of them, for instance, could be insurance. So you can pay a small portion of your tokens, get an insurance versus the value. You could say, if the value of this token drops below this price, I want to be able to claim losses on that. And I want to be able to claim on my insurance. So that's one example. I'm still trying to get my head around it because, yeah, and it says I'm having a decentralized. We probably need to also like maybe touch a little bit on the different words and what exactly they mean for people who are not very familiar with them. But it sounds like, OK, I have this project that's like I get coins for an insurance that's insuring my value of different currencies or other coins. It sounds like this kind of endless loop. Yeah, it basically is an endless loop. The thing is, I could explain it. No, I'm not going to explain it because there's a lot of like base knowledge that's required. And it's not like it would take hours and hours, but it's probably a bit too much to talk about right now. You said it's theoretically possible to start something today and launch pretty much very quick. What could you share with people who are really dreaming and planning to launch their own cryptocurrency with your experience? How would you kick off such a big project and what are the things to look at? Assuming you don't want to pull out the money quite fast. Assuming you don't want to pull the rug. As I said, like there's kind of different ways. And really the whole idea of these, a lot of these at least, isn't to launch a cryptocurrency. The idea is to launch a product in the decentralized finance space. And the token is like a kind of part of that where that just allows people to govern the product and say what's happening. It's flipping the whole kind of C-level concept on its head and saying actually the customers are the people that run the company. That's a kind of better way to look at it. The customers become the ones that define the product direction essentially. That's interesting product philosophy to have the community or the people using the product agreeing on priorities and what's happening next. Let's say the community is requesting a certain feature. How do you approach building this? One kind of big thing or one piece of context here that kind of helps is obviously in this space the technology is the huge part of this, right? The technology is a thing that's powering the whole thing. Up until recently design and product thinking or anything around that didn't really have a big role to play in the space. It was basically text on a page does the thing you needed to do. You probably need to be pretty technically adept to understand it. Now we're moving a bit more towards product design having a role to play. But the kind of things that you have in that place as a product person or as a designer is less purely about UX or UI design and also more about deeper technology. So really being involved in those conversations about how it's possible to achieve something on a technological level with the technology that we have available to us. And how you can incentivize like economic models for instance. So you become more involved in those aspects of products as opposed to the pure UX and UI. That's the less important part at that point. Speaking about product organizations in a space that's pretty technical and where product and design is just there like since recently. How are these organizations structured or how do they work? Maybe you can also share a little bit from your experience. How can we imagine such a product organization then look like? I don't have so much experience in large organizations in this space. There's definitely bigger ones. There's huge ones at this point. One, two, three hundred people involved in them. I don't have any exposure to anything like that. I only have exposure to community, very community driven projects. But in my experience around that it's super community driven like today or yesterday for instance. I was on a discord in one of these communities I'm involved in. They're building multiple projects concurrently. The whole idea for this project is a venture builder company or a venture builder project. And they said are there any designers here? I said oh I'm here. And they said oh great. I shared my work and they were happy for me to get involved. And this morning I just designed the UI for one of the products that's already being built right now. Within a weekend there'll be likely a project live in the space already. Very ad hoc. Basically someone has an idea. They write spec for it. The interesting thing is there's not really much talk to external people. It's very technically driven right now at the time we're in. And a lot of it's experimental, right? Maybe later that's a thing where we could interview people and do more user testing. But right now it's more about shipping something and iterating on that later. Due to the fact that it's so technologically driven it starts also very much with that. First of all the technology that needs to be in place with basic interfaces and then you're going to iterate on this. Do you think this will also change in the future or would you think it will always be this more tech driven area and niche? We're at the ground floor right now. Nothing like this has ever happened. This is the first time this has ever happened. And even this concept of this whole governance thing where the customers are the people voting on or deciding what happens. That hasn't existed for long enough to even know what's going to happen. Nobody knows. I think it's a complete new chapter. I remember back then when people were designing and building the iPhone it was an isolated group that was just thinking of what is best for the customers. It's now an exceptional product but it went well. In this case it's completely different. We have a complete new way of how people work and collaborate. So there's the foundation of a technology and then the community decides what they want for sure with the support of the designers and people inside. I think people basically will be making proposals. I could say I think this should happen. And the people who are involved in the project as developers or designers or thinkers in general. They'll be in a position to try and validate that and see whether it makes sense. What are the potential implications of that on a technical or product side. Even looking further than that like how would this impact the economic model of the platform. Really going into the details and then deciding whether that makes sense after the fact. But the interesting part is the customers really have to be very knowledgeable to be able to provide these kind of propositions or proposals. They need to know the inner workings the technical workings in some cases and know what the kind of what the outcomes will be or at least provide some examples of what they think that would be. It still sounds like very niche. While the community aspect is like very user centric. If everyone would really allow their community to drive product and design decisions that would be amazing. But at the same time the community is still kind of users are the ones also using it, developing it, interacting with it. And there is not really this end user consumer when we talk about these more techie ones. While Donut I mean you also mentioned user research and so on. You approach it from a different aspect. You were not like in this deep niche kind of techie world but you were using existing Bitcoin for example to allow everyone to access it. Do you think that the let's say deeper I'm not sure like how we should call it now for this session. But the more technical side of things will realistically ever become like open to consumers and reach a point where everyone can use them. Yeah the way I see it is it's very open. I see two sides to it. So I see the kind of consumer siding face where potentially for instance Donut that would be the consumer siding face. That is plugging in to these decentralized finance protocols. So on the protocol level you'll have people governing it saying what they think should happen next. And then on the top level the surface level you have the kind of consumer UI that's plugging in to that. Anyone on the consumer side doesn't need to know that it's plugged into this protocol. If they want to they can get them they can actually dive that level deeper and get involved in that protocol. If not then they never have to worry about it. But the interesting part as well is that these kind of consumer facing products also have a say in what happens on the protocol level. Those then also define through that the voting mechanism what their own product is capable of as well. So you as a designer would pretty much become the interface between understanding what does the consumer need, what the consumer needs. And then like also pour it back into the community when you're working on this community driven projects that actually set the foundations for this consumer product. So it's a two side of traditionally you would speak about like core banking systems and what then Fintech builds on top of it. You could use the analogy and put it on any traditional finance product. If we say for a sum up for instance that integrated with normal banking stocks and other features like that. The big problem there was that sum up would never have any real control over what is allowed or what isn't allowed. And it's really the banks that control what is allowed. In this world anything can happen. And if people want that change they can vote that change in pretty easily in a short space of time basically. Maybe to pull this whole conversation a little bit back. Working in this field as a designer what has been like the biggest challenge for you and how did you tackle it? It's a big question. I think the big challenge and I don't think I ever really necessarily solved it. I definitely tried to tackle it. Was this thing about really trying to change behaviors around finances. It's a really difficult thing to do especially when you're trying to do it outside of someone's normal life and the normal interactions they have day to day. I'd like to say somehow the whole kind of roundup feature does somehow work and somehow hit the mark. Because people are going about their day normally paying with their card and they're buying Bitcoin in the background. So I'd like to say that somehow that did work but I don't think it was solved. So I would say that's something that I was the biggest challenge and probably will continue to be the biggest challenge for me moving forward is I want everyone to be involved in this thing. So to do that we need to incentivize people and we need to change their behavior and hopefully help them understand why it's a good thing for them to do. Do you think it would help if traditional banks would actually try to put a step in that direction and to start offering similar solutions or offering people to directly get access to cryptocurrencies. Because maybe there is more trust and even like we talked about like the mama being able to use it. Maybe my mom would be more let's say comfortable in just like putting their money in a crypto fund that's offered by the bank she's with since 40 years instead of using a new crypto product. Yeah it's a bit of a catch 22 because you want people to be involved in that but the traditional finance and banking system is the opposite of what you want when you're building this. So it's definitely it's a pretty difficult thing and I think we will see that happen more over the next five years of different kind of banks like normal neobanks for instance bringing in some of these decentralized finance functionalities. I'm sure that will happen in the next couple of years but it's against the idea in the first place. So it's an interesting one. What was the biggest learning especially like from talking to users in that direction. Did you get a sense of like insecurity or. There's always a sense of unease at the beginning. People like to have as much information as they can early on and they like to experiment with it. See if their money is going to get taken if they're going to lose everything. But usually from the experience I had and what I've seen people get comfortable with it pretty quick and they'll pretty quickly become happy to put more money into these protocols over time. Once they realize one first of all I'm making money a lot more than I would in my normal bank account with this interest. And two it was a pretty nice place to have an overview of their assets in a kind of separate space where they're not really touching it and spending it. Well so much more to talk about when it comes to crypto. I could I could literally talk about this for hours honestly. In order to come to a closing maybe you can share with us or with the audience especially from your product design perspective the key learnings you made since you joined this world of crypto. What would you recommend a new starter to look at. What would I recommend. Do you mean in the context of a designer or do you mean just any anyone in general trying to be a designer. I think the good place to start is just exposed trying to expose yourself to some of these new protocols and trying to for instance look through documentation have an idea about how this stuff works like. I don't know if this space is for everyone but I personally find it really exciting. I think if you can expose yourself to the things like that documentation and try and understand how it works. I don't see how someone who isn't technically minded or product minded wouldn't be really interested once they get a grasp of how these things work. Great. Cool. So I guess lots of learnings. I think it's still a lot of question marks around this whole crypto space but I guess it's also something that you cannot easily cover in such a short time. But yeah we will also make sure to link you so in case someone wants to reach you on Twitter or some social medias. What's your Twitter name. It's LEMURF L E M U R F. We'll make sure to also put it in the description so everyone can find you. Thanks for taking the time. It was lovely to speak to you today. Lovely to see you again after quite some time between SumUp and now. And yeah. Talk to you soon. Thank you very much Liam. Thanks for having me. All right. As usual again quickly a debrief about the session. Christian what are your key takeaways. How do you feel. First of all as you said a lot of question marks on this whole world of crypto. I didn't get my answer how I can make money very fast. However I was actually very blown about the fact that this is so community driven. My key takeaway is that there's a complete different way of building products which is so super open to the needs of people and getting the feedback directly from them was to me quite mind blowing. And I also realized that a product manager maybe doesn't make sense in such a setup at all. It was also super interesting to understand how this whole stuff behind the scenes works. Like having this kind of super quick upcoming information in Discord and Telegram that there is a new cryptocurrency and people jumping on this. As well as the fact that there's also the dark side on this where people just trying to make money really fast. Pull the rug. Exactly pull the rug like Liam said. My key takeaway is here your community is for the win. I really like the fact that people have the chance to get direct feedback and making sure that people are implementing it somehow. Yeah I think the community aspect is super important and it's also something that some pretty successful other companies like in the financial space did a really good job with this by really including also people directly in the development prioritization process. And I think it's something that hopefully gets more and more traction. At the same time I'm really surprised and it's somehow scary like to see this whole world completely decentralized without a lot of regulations. And we also discussed I spent a lot of time working in financial technologies and usually a lot of those things are driven by regulations. And you really have to follow a lot of predefined protocols and it's different from country to country and so on. Licensing etc. Absolutely. So I think seeing also how this whole world survives in an unregulated space that's pretty much like also regulated and driven by the community is super interesting. And I'm wondering like how this in the future will also extend to other products. Alex we should just start investing and see what's happening. I will probably just ask Liam to invest my funds because he knows more about this. And yeah I really think we should definitely follow up at one point and go a little bit deeper on this whole topic or as mentioned earlier pretty sure like Liam is also happy to jump on any sort of questions in the space. So yeah. Yeah. Feel free to follow Liam on Twitter. Limurv is his name. And other than that thank you very much. Looking forward to talking to you next time. And as usual if you have any feedback or recommendations or any guests that we should talk to in the upcoming sessions feel free to drop us a line at hello at product-bakery.com. And yeah. Enjoy the rest of the day night and talk to you in our next episode.