Helius

Overview

Company: Helius is an enterprise-grade Solana developer platform and the #1 staking provider trusted by companies like: Coinbase, Bloomberg, and Bitwise Asset Management.

Industry: Crypto / Infrastructure

My Role: Solo designer across our website, developer portal, and block explorer.

Tools: Figma, Rive, Blender, Linear

AI Tools: Claude, Flora

Results

• Reduced support requests by redesigning crypto subscription flow for better self-service

• Solved dedicated nodes purchase friction through redesigned selection flow

• Improved time-on-site with animations that made technical concepts digestible

• Accelerated portal shipping from weeks to single-week sprints via UI library and prototypes

• Strengthened hiring pipeline with new careers page

Special thanks: To Mert for being the best manager—he taught me what excellent leadership looks like at a fast-paced, lean company. And to Nick, Haji, and Vishant: I wouldn't rather be in the dev portal trenches with anyone else.

Problem

When I joined Helius, the product experience hadn't kept pace with the company's rapid growth.

Developers were getting stuck on basic flows. The crypto subscription process confused developers and flooded our Telegram with support requests. The dedicated nodes flow had the same issue—developers were buying the wrong configurations and needing to switch after purchase.

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Internally, the engineering team was operating without design support or a UI library.

The website had just been redesigned by an agency but needed immediate iteration and polish from the internal team. We also had no careers page, which was critical since hiring was a top priority for 2025.

Resolution

I took a two-pronged approach: reduce friction for users while building systems with the team.

For customer-facing problems, I focused on meeting developers where they were. Rather than assuming technical knowledge, I embedded education directly into flows—explaining delegate wallets in context during subscription setup and building a guided wizard for dedicated nodes that asked about use cases rather than forcing users to interpret specs.

Internally, I established systems to help the team move faster. I got us set up in Linear, introduced a UI library, and began a prototype-first workflow that gave engineers everything they needed to ship without constant back-and-forth.

I also worked to elevate the brand by designing custom Rive animations to make our technical depth visible and building a careers page to attract the caliber of talent we needed.

The work created the foundation for sustainable growth: self-service products that reduced support burden, design workflows that accelerated shipping, and brand presence that helped us compete.

Dedicated nodes

Developers frequently purchased dedicated nodes that didn't meet their actual needs, and we only discovered this after they'd already committed.

Each mis-purchase meant:

• Support tickets to understand what went wrong

• Downtime or performance issues for their app

• Frustration with the buying experience

• Lost revenue opportunity if they churned

The original flow assumed users already knew exactly what they needed.

The root cause was information architecture. The flow presented raw technical specifications—CPU cores, memory, RPC throughput—without context about when you'd need those specs. Developers had to translate their use case ("I'm building a trading bot") into technical requirements ("Do I need 24 CPU cores?").

Solution

I designed a wizard to guide developers to the right node for them.

The redesign guides users to the right choice by reducing intimidation, improving clarity, and providing contextual help at decision points. This shift from "figure it out yourself" to "we'll help you choose" is what made the testing results so positive.

We also needed to help developers avoid overbuying. Many were purchasing dedicated nodes when shared plans would have served them perfectly—and saved them high costs. To do this, I added a banner to draw attention.

Behind-the-scenes

One of my favorite parts of this project was seeing a branding opportunity to create a Helius-branded CPU. Small moments like this, I think, really help brands differentiate themselves.

I rendered it in Blender and created the custom label in Photoshop.

Crypto subscriptions

Crypto subscriptions are notoriously difficult to get right. No platform in the space had cracked the UX; we aimed to be the first.

Challenge

We used Loop for delegate wallet management, which introduced a critical concept that some Solana developers weren't familiar with: authorization limits via a delegate wallet. This wasn't just a nice-to-have feature—if devs didn't properly manage their auth limits, they'd become delinquent and risk their app breaking entirely.

Phase 1 was launching the backend connected to Loop, which meant our frontend looked like this at launch.

Beyond the UI issues, we faced a fundamental trust problem. We were asking developers to authorize wallet access up to a certain amount. Security-conscious developers set conservative limits, but this meant frequent top-ups. If they forgot to refill, they risk their app going down.

We needed to balance security instincts with operational reliability.

Pre-pixel pushing

This was my first experience designing for authorization limits. As with any design problem, my first step was to make sure I fully understood what was in front of me. So: 1) how delegate wallets worked and 2) technical limitations.

I worked with our engineer Haji to diagram the delegate wallet flow and identify all the pieces users needed to understand

First attempt

We initially moved all auth limit management to Loop, thinking it made sense to consolidate wallet operations in one place. This quickly proved problematic—sending users to an external platform for a task they might need to do frequently created friction and broke the experience.

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Solution

We brought auth limit management back into our dev portal and redesigned the mental model.

Instead of asking users to calculate and input a manual amount (which required understanding the underlying mechanics), I introduced duration-based selection: "How long do you want this to last?"

Devs could choose 1 month, 3 months, or 6 months, and the system would calculate the appropriate auth limit. Advanced users could still set manual amounts if they preferred. As a guardrail, if a user entered "0", they'd understand it would cancel their subscription.

You'll notice that in the final design, the term was changed from "Authorization limit" to "Spending limit". We hypothesized that the name itself was contributing to the confusion, so we teamed up with Loop

Terms we tested:

• Spending limit

• Spending allowance

• Authorization

I reached out to customers in our Telegram community to quickly test, sharing prototypes directly for feedback. Testing confirmed "spending limit" was the best terminology, and we aligned with Loop on the change so it could be changed across both portals and customer emails.

Developers also raised a critical concern: they needed reassurance that they could cancel spending limits immediately after payment. We added clear copy in the checkout flow to address this, giving security-conscious developers peace of mind.

Billing interface

Solving crypto subscriptions was one piece of the puzzle. But to truly reduce support load, we needed to redesign the billing UI where developers managed their spending limits.

I moved billing to a dedicated page to reduce cognitive overload, changed "Authorization Limit" to the clearer "Spending Limit," and surfaced critical context, including billing cycle dates, days remaining, and wallet balance.

Most importantly, I repositioned the spending limit as one detail among many rather than the intimidating centerpiece—making the entire experience feel manageable instead of overwhelming.

Careers page

Helius needed a careers page that reflected our culture: fast-moving and ambitious.

I outlined the structure and copy in Notion, got stakeholder approval, and then designed the page with emphasis on our operating values. I handed off production-ready designs to our engineer Koen, we QA'd together, and launched in just 2 days.

The page helped us attract candidates who aligned with our operating principles.

Animations

To elevate Helius's brand presence and make complex infrastructure concepts more accessible, I designed a series of custom Rive animations for the website.

Crypto infrastructure is inherently technical and abstract. Developers understand what RPC nodes and blockchain data do, but static graphics don't convey the speed and reliability that make Helius different. We needed motion that felt both premium and purposeful—not gratuitous animation, but movement that actually communicated product value.

Working in Rive meant I could:

• Create lightweight animations that performed well across devices (much smaller file sizes than video or Lottie)

• Build interactivity and state machines (animations could respond to user actions or scroll position)

• Export once and use everywhere (web, mobile, marketing materials)

Fun fact:

This was my first time working in Rive! Instead of shying away from it until I learned and felt "ready", I jumped right in and learned along the way. I completed five custom animations in roughly 3 hours.

Orb support

Beyond the dev portal and website, I provided design support for Orb, Helius's blockchain explorer.

Orb has since become the default explorer on Phantom, Solana's leading wallet.

My involvement:

• I designed the Orb logo to give the product its own identity

• Made UI improvements to key areas such as filtering

• Served as a design advisor to the engineering team

This was primarily strategic contributions where design support was most needed.

The design agency Airfoil did the bulk of the work on the explorer itself. Go check them out!

Collaboration

Helius moves fast. The working style was autonomous, intense, and rewarding—you had the freedom to make decisions and the responsibility to ship quality work quickly.

As the sole designer across the website, developer portal, and advisor on the blockchain explorer, the scope was demanding. I collaborated most closely with the dev portal team on billing flows, where the technical complexity and customer impact were highest.

Balancing three distinct surfaces could have been overwhelming, but the team's support made it work. Engineers were invested in getting the details right, stakeholders trusted my decisions, and everyone moved with urgency. The environment pushed me to work faster and smarter than I had before.