Product design | MELD Wallet

Onboarding redesign to lift conversion.

Seedless Wallet Creation

MELD started as a non-custodial crypto wallet and grew into a broader financial product. As the only designer on the web product, I owned its evolution as it scaled from a simple wallet into staking, borrowing and lending.

In crypto, trust is fragile and the cost of a mistake is permanent. Users carry real security responsibility from the first minute, and the instinct is to front-load it, to make people prove they are secure before they are allowed in. That instinct was quietly working against us.

The problem

Activation was low. People started creating a wallet and never finished. The reason was structural. The single most demanding task in the entire experience, the 24-word seed phrase and its verification, came first, before the user had seen anything the product could do. Copying 24 words to paper and validating them back is genuinely heavy, and we were asking for it at the exact moment the user had the least reason to care.

So the question was not how to add more protection. It was how to change when protection applies. The seed phrase is a non-negotiable standard in blockchain, so I could not remove it. But I could move it.

Seedless creation

I redesigned wallet creation so it no longer required the seed phrase to get in. The user could create a wallet and enter the product immediately, and securing it became a deliberate choice made afterward, not a toll paid at the door.

At the point of creation, the flow offered a clear two-path decision. Go directly to your wallet, or secure your seed phrase now. Choosing to skip was not frictionless, it triggered a confirmation that asked the user to acknowledge what they were skipping. So even the skip was designed to be deliberate, not careless.

Original flow

4 steps to entry

Seed phrase, verification and a separate password all came before the user reached the product.

1
Entry point. Create a wallet.
Entry point. Create a wallet.
2
The 24-word seed phrase, shown first.
The 24-word seed phrase, shown first.
3
Verification of all 24 words. The heaviest step, and it came up front.
Verification of all 24 words. The heaviest step, and it came up front.
4
A separate password on top.
A separate password on top.
5
Wallets generating across chains.
Wallets generating across chains.
6
Done. Only now is the user in.
Done. Only now is the user in.
7
The first time the user sees the product. Four steps in.
The first time the user sees the product. Four steps in.

Seedless flow

3 steps to entry

A two-path choice replaces the wall. The seed phrase still exists, it just no longer blocks entry. Use the fork to follow either path.

1
The same entry point.
The same entry point.
2
A deliberate two-path choice, up front.
A deliberate two-path choice, up front.
Does the user want to skip the seed phrase?
3
Go directly. The risk is acknowledged, not hidden.
Go directly. The risk is acknowledged, not hidden.
4
Or secure now, by choice.
Or secure now, by choice.
5
The 24 words.
The 24 words.
6
Confirm them.
Confirm them.
7
Wallets generating across chains.
Wallets generating across chains.
8
Done.
Done.
9
In the product in three steps. Securing can come right after.
In the product in three steps. Securing can come right after.

Keeping security inevitable

Letting people in unsecured is a real risk, and I did not want to hide it. So the unsecured state was made impossible to ignore. A persistent red banner sat across the top of the wallet, asking the user to write down and save their seed phrase, and it could not be dismissed. The only way to clear it was to actually complete the seed phrase procedure.

That is the whole idea in one move. Entry was easy. Security was unavoidable. The friction was not removed, it was relocated to a place where it no longer blocked discovery but never stopped applying pressure.

The MELD wallet with a persistent, non-dismissable seed phrase banner across the top
The persistent banner, top, could not be dismissed until the wallet was secured. The same screen shows the three-column layout that kept the product legible as it grew: assets left, value and chart center, activity and actions right.

Outcome

After the redesign, the product owner reported onboarding drop-off falling by roughly 70 percent, and daily active users grew from around 3,000 to nearly 10,000 over the same period.

I attribute the improvement to the redesign, since the timing lines up and nothing else of that scale changed. I also want to be precise. Measurement maturity at the company was limited, so I read this as a strong directional result rather than a controlled one. The number is real. The certainty around it is not something I would overstate.

Reflection

The lesson I carry from this is that security and friction are not the same thing, even when a product treats them as if they were. The seed phrase had to exist. Where it sat in the experience was a design choice, not a security requirement. Most of the activation problem lived in that gap, between what genuinely had to be protected and what we had simply assumed had to come first.

×Enlarged screen