Resolv

Client: Resolv
Role: Freelance Product Designer
Timeline: 2024–2025
Deliverables: Dashboard design, Modular UI library, Frontend handoff

Total value locked: $600M+
Protocol launch: Sep 2024
Earning activities designed: 100+
Slippage on direct mints: 0

Resolv is a DeFi protocol built around USR, a stablecoin that holds its dollar peg with a delta-neutral position in ETH and BTC. The market risk of that position sits in RLP, a separate token that absorbs losses in exchange for higher yield. The protocol launched in September 2024 and passed $600M in total value locked within months.

I joined as a freelance product designer while it scaled. The engagement was design work end to end: I redesigned the core dashboards, built the modular UI library underneath them, and handed both to the frontend team in a form they could ship weekly.

The product structure

USR and RLP are claims on the same collateral pool with opposite exposures. RLP takes losses first, which is what lets USR stay flat. Every screen has to keep that relationship legible, because a holder of either token is trusting the other side of it.

The same collateral pool, split into opposite exposures.
	USR	RLP
Function	Dollar-pegged stablecoin	Insurance layer protecting the peg
Price	$1.00	Floating, tracks strategy performance
Risk	Hedged, delta-neutral	Absorbs the pool's drawdowns
Yield	Stable staking yield	Higher, with leveraged exposure
Held by	Risk-averse users and treasuries	DeFi-native risk takers

Dashboard design

The portfolio dashboard gives each token an equal panel: price, total value locked, the composition of the backing, and yield history across 7-day, 30-day and all-time ranges. Oversized serif figures carry the numbers, and everything secondary is set small in mono. The state of the protocol is readable before a single sentence is.

The Resolv portfolio dashboard split into USR and RLP panels: USR at $1.00 with $20,795,436 total value locked and a backing bar split between institutional custody and exchanges, RLP at $23.81 with $4,124,022 locked, each above a 30-day APR chart with 7D, 30D and all-time ranges — The main dashboard: USR and RLP side by side, each with TVL, backing composition and yield history.

Backing is the claim a stablecoin lives or dies on, so it is surfaced rather than buried. The collateral pool page breaks the pool down by venue: institutional custody, exchanges, on-chain ETH and staked ETH, each with its share. Treasury wallets are linked to Etherscan and DeBank, so composition is verifiable on-chain rather than asserted.

The collateral pool page: USR and RLP cards with price, total value locked and all-time APR bar charts, above pool-level TVL and APR charts and an assets-by-location list linking the on-chain treasury wallet to Etherscan and DeBank — The collateral pool page: composition by venue, with treasury wallets linked to Etherscan and DeBank.

Risk communication continues at the point of purchase. Each token has a detail panel that rates risk, stability and earnings on plain meters, beside the contract address. A buyer sees the trade-off before the buy button.

Two dashboard views with token detail panels open: a blue $USR panel described as a delta-neutral stablecoin with meters for low risk, high stability and middle earnings, and an orange RLP panel with meters for moderate risk, middle stability and high earnings, each beside its ETH contract address — Token detail panels: risk, stability and earnings on plain meters, next to the contract address.

The same layout compresses to a single column on mobile. The hierarchy holds because every screen is assembled from the same stat blocks.

Minting and swapping

Access to the tokens is tiered. Retail users trade through DEX liquidity such as Curve. Whitelisted users, KYC-verified and writing larger tickets, mint directly with the protocol at par, with no slippage. For them the swap widget quotes both routes side by side: receive amount, gas, fees and effective rate, with the better price flagged.

The portfolio dashboard beside an open swap widget quoting 900 USDC to RLP on both routes: Swap at Resolv flagged as best price with receive amount, gas and swap fees itemised, against the Curve route at +0.25% — The swap widget quoting the direct mint route against Curve, with the better price flagged.

A DeFi transaction includes an on-chain wait the interface cannot shorten, only explain. The widget moves through explicit states, each with its own motion on the Resolv mark:

Getting approval
The protocol prepares the transaction, a hold of 10 to 15 seconds. The left half of the mark pulses.
Confirm transaction
Approval granted; the user confirms and execution begins. The pulsing stops.
Staking
The signed transaction is posted to the chain. The right half of the mark pulses.
Staked
The halves settle into a circle. Tokens arrive shortly, with a link to the transaction on Etherscan.

An error state completes the set: both halves turn red and separate. The full sequence went to engineering as an annotated board, with the motion of each state written next to it.

A board of five swap-widget states, from getting approval through confirm, staking and staked to an error state, each showing the Resolv mark's two halves in a different arrangement with an annotation describing its motion — The state board as delivered: five states of the swap widget, each annotated with its motion.

The design system

Resolv shipped continuously: new providers, new campaigns, new seasons of the points program. A fixed set of screens would have gone stale in a month, so I built the library in three layers with strict composition between them.

Tier 1/primitive
The raw marks. No layout opinions, no product context.
label / value
A caption, a figure and a rule between them. Most of the interface is this row, repeated.
meter
Composition bars and rating scales, reused from the collateral pool page down to the token panels.
flag
Small status markers, such as the best-price flag on a quote.
Tier 2/part
Primitives composed into a unit with one job.
provider card
One route quote: receive amount, gas, fees, effective rate. Every swap provider is an instance of this card.
stat block
A headline figure, its composition bar and its chart. The dashboard is four of these.
activity card
One earning activity: rate, cadence, action. The points program is a grid of these.
Tier 3/application
Parts assembled into a shipped surface.
portfolio dashboard
swap widget
points program

Three layers, strictly composed. New requirements land as new instances of an existing part, not as new patterns.

The structure earned its keep when routing changed. Retail swaps later consolidated behind a single aggregator, so the side-by-side comparison retired. Because every provider was an instance of the same card, the interface simplified by deleting instances. Nothing was redesigned.

Handoff went beyond redlines. Components shipped with their behavior specified: skeleton states for loading, debounced polling for live quotes, and quote expiry after 15 to 30 seconds so a stale price can never be executed. Where code was faster than a spec, I delivered code; the referral celebration ran in production on a prototype I built with js-confetti.

Scaling the points program

Season 3 of the points program allocated 3% of total supply to incentives. The activity list grew from roughly ten entries to more than a hundred as integrations landed: Curve, Pendle, Spectra, Euler, Morpho, Uniswap, Aerodrome and others.

Earning activities in the points program

At launch

Season 3

The list grew tenfold. The activity card held; the information architecture around it changed.

Label	Value
At launch	10
Season 3	100

The design problem became findability rather than presentation. I added filtering by chain, activity type and earning category, so a yield trader on Arbitrum and a passive USR holder each see the short list that applies to them.

A grid of earning-activity cards: holding USR, staked USR and RLP, liquidity on Curve, Spectra, Pendle and Aerodrome, lending on Euler and Morpho, borrowing on August, trading and referral actions, each with its points rate and cadence — Activity cards at scale: holding, liquidity, lending, trading and referrals across a dozen integrated protocols.

The points page: total points, daily earnings and active boosts on the left with a referral card, and a filterable list of earning activities on the right with chain and category filters and per-activity point rates — The points page in Season 3: balances and boosts on the left, the filterable activity list on the right.

Outcome

For a protocol asking people to park nine figures of capital, the interface is part of the risk assessment. Clear dashboards, verifiable backing and predictable transactions were design's share of that trust.