if you’re building a trading product, you need to nail these: any trading (or financial markets) product has: 1) discover assets (alpha/info/charts) 2) actions (buy/sell/long/short/yes/no/deposit) 3) manage assets (positions/porfolio) you miss one part & product falls apart 1) asset discovery: - design for infinite discovery: your product need to have a way for user to progressively discover assets & relevant info (charts/token info/fundamentals etc) more surface area for discovery = more time spent = more trades - reduce text, increase numbers/charts: numbers & charts consumes much lesser time & surface area and reveal much higher insights as compared to texts your interface should look clean & structured but never kill any data points for the sake of simplicity no trader likes an empty section/whitespace on a screen - everyone needs an edge (or atleast need an illusion that they’ve an edge) any product-enabled edges will always attract traders eg. @fomo shows top trader by highest PnL - to create an illusion that you can have an edge by checking top trader's trades @gmgnai allowed to track many X accounts & labelled wallets - assets coverage: trading is a way to get exposure to a narrative or sector more assets you surface = more they'll trade (imo, personalisation of asset discovery eg. feeds is still an unexplored design space) 2) trading actions: - <5s action: if your product requires any cognition overload to simply buy/sell, they won’t trade make it dead simple to enter amount & just click green/red buttons (just like casino slots) eg. @AxiomExchange allows to put presets (eg. 10 USDC) to make it buy literally 1-click action CTAs (deposit/buy/sell/long/short) should always be accessible from info/alpha i.e if a user has already developed conviction, let them take trade instantly i.e any info (incl. alerts) should lead with an action CTA - instant dopamine & feedback: just after placing a trade, a user has to feel their trade is moving (instant gratification) - even casino or gacha has instant dopamine loop with sound & numbers moving eg. @AxiomExchange optimistically sends you the confirmation with a sound and instant display on chart with B label (all client-side and it keeps sending on backend/chain) - never remove optionality: never reduce any trading features (eg. take profit) for sake of simplifying just make it a optional UX (toggle for advanced orders): no traders wanna feel they can’t do 'advanced trades' - even if they rarely do 3) manage assets: - keep things moving: user need to feel their positions are changing every second to have that dopamine hit + user’s positions/net worth should be as accessible as possible (they wanna keep checking their trade's performance) - easy to adjust positions: users constantly change their mind as markets move eg. adding/removing collateral, tp/sl should be dead simple - risk visibility: always surface liquidation, leverage, PnL & exposure clearly traders love risk, but they hate being surprised by it 4) bonus: trading apps are most complex engineering-wise, you can't compromise on: - reliability (it should just work 24/7!) - speed (both data & execution) - liveness (stale data is more dangerous than no data) (ofc, liquidity needs to be deep enough: either native exchange or underlying exchange) once the core loop works, referrals, rewards & social features can compound retention/growth ---- crypto is now 'trade any markets' we already have insane trading apps like fomo, axiom, pump, gmgn (all doing $1m/day in fees) - and much more advanced than any non-crypto fintech apps and i feel we've barely scratched the surface, we'll see a huge wave of trading apps getting built this cycle: tackling with different wedges: - mobile - ai - social - gachafication and enable to trade any markets using crypto rails! 🫡