Hey everyone,
I want to share a brief summary of my experience as a Bitcoin Design Foundation Grantee. For those who don’t know me, let me briefly introduce myself. My name is Erik and I’m a Bitcoin product designer focused on improving the design of the Cashu, one of the two main ecash implementations on bitcoin. I think ecash has the potential to significantly improve the usability of bitcoin as a medium of exchange. It fundamentally changes how people interact with bitcoin. Instead of the typical “pull” UX where the receiver has to initiate the transaction or provide a destination before the payment can be completed, ecash unlocks a “push” UX. This means users can send bitcoin to anyone via any delivery method: SMS, Bluetooth, chat apps, you name it. It’s the closest experience we’ve got to handing someone physical cash. Peer to peer.
Over the last few months I’ve had the privilege of being supported by the Bitcoin Design Foundation as one of their grantees. It's not lost on me how incredibly lucky I am to wake up each day and work on Bitcoin products, but the responsibility of delivering high quality work feels heightened. There's no boss assigning tasks or deadlines, just a goal. It's entirely up to me to set standards and deliver craft at a level I feel proud of.
During my grant period I initially set out to write the ecash section of the Bitcoin Design Guide. Over time, I expanded my contributions into several other projects:
- Sovran: The Bitcoin Design Community and Bitshala launched a design fellowship partnership. Over the past few months, I’ve collaborated closely with Sushant to contribute designs to Sovran, an open-source lightning and ecash wallet. Sovran officially launched last month. We're continuing our support by redesigning several flows.
- Save Our Wallets: This was an advocacy campaign supporting HR 1747 (the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act). The bill clarifies that open-source developers who don’t custody user funds are not money transmitters. It was a collaboration between the Bitcoin Design Community and Matt Corallo. The Bitcoin Design Community provided the initial art direction, and I built the front-end website.
- Cashu x BTCPay Server Plugin: Collaborated with d4r on a BTCPay Server plugin that allows merchants to accept Cashu payments.
- Athenut: A privacy-preserving search engine powered by Kagi, where users pay with ecash tokens for each search. No accounts or methods link searches to users. I worked with TheSimpleKid to design the font-end website.
- OpenCash: Designed and deployed the website for the OpenCash Association, a nonprofit funding development in the Cashu ecosystem.
- Cashu.space: Designed and deployed the official website for the Cashu protocol.
- Brr: I've been working with Veronika on a redesign of Gandalf’s Brr print tool. Veronika contributed excellent ecash note designs during the designathon, and now she's redesigning the entire Brr tool. Veronika handles the design, and I’m building it out using Cursor and Vibe. You can follow our progress here.
- Bitchat Cashu Wallet: Most recently, I’ve been converting my Figma design components directly into code using Figma MCP and Cursor. I recently built a fully functional Cashu wallet into a fork of Bitchat for Android. It was an incredible learning experience, which I detailed here. I’m looking forward to doing more experiments like this.
Working fulltime through grant funding has been an entirely new challenge. The biggest hurdle has been mastering my time and task management. When you have total freedom to choose which tasks to tackle and when, it significantly increases your responsibility to organize and manage your workflow.
I’ve recently started using Sunsama to plan my days, track tasks, and monitor the time spent on each one. This has transformed my workflow, and I highly recommend Sunsama or any other task management tool you’re comfortable with. If I could go back I’d have started using task management software much earlier. It would have helped me stay more organized, track projects closer, and allocate realistic time frames for each.
Another thing that’s very important is to work in public and share your progress. I’ve been trying to make it a habit of regularly posting some updates on things and projects I’ve been working on in my substack.
Going forward I plan to keep working on the reference wallet for Cashu and continue contributing design work to the Fedimint web wallet. I’m genuinely excited about the future of vibe coding. It’s been a game changer for me.
On the Cashu side, we’re actively discussing the best path forward for building the reference wallet. Some potential routes include using a Flutter-Dart bridge or bindings to build a native app.
I’ll also be picking up more bitcoin and ecash related projects as they come. This space is constantly evolving. You never know what exciting new thing is around the corner. Despite the rapid pace of change, I love working on these projects, and I don’t plan on slowing down anytime soon.