SuperHedge – principal-protected DeFi structured vaults

SuperHedge set out to bridge traditional and decentralised finance — offering structured yield products with principal protection to investors who wouldn’t typically venture into DeFi.

The core challenge was making sophisticated derivatives-based strategies legible to a broader audience without stripping out what made them valuable. The client needed a platform that felt trustworthy and transparent, handled complex financial logic cleanly, and didn’t require a DeFi background to navigate. At the same time, the build had to stay cost-efficient — an MVP that covered the essentials without scope creeping into features that could come later.

Our role was to make sure the complexity of the financial products didn’t become the complexity of the user experience.

Good design starts with understanding who you’re building for. That means research — user behaviour, market trends, the competitive landscape — before any design decisions get made. What comes out of that shapes the features, the functionality, and the overall structure of the app.

From there the ideas get translated into something tangible. Wireframes first, to work out the layout and user flow, then detailed mockups that bring in the visual design and branding. Neither stage is precious — both exist to be tested and revised.

User feedback runs through the whole process, not just at the end. It’s what turns a first attempt into something worth building.

The BA’s main job at this stage was breaking down the product’s planned features into smaller, manageable components — getting a clear picture of what each feature actually required and how the pieces depended on each other. That process also surfaced a handful of non-essential features that could be pushed to a post-MVP release, keeping the initial build within budget.

Running in parallel, the UX designer mapped out the application structure. The feature set wasn’t large enough to warrant a heavyweight framework, so we used a hybrid of Information Architecture and User Flows — practical for the project’s scale and easier on the client’s budget.

Wireframing was where the core user experience took shape. We mapped out all the key flows — selecting a vault, tracking earnings, navigating the NFT-based deposit system — and quickly ran into the central design problem: making principal protection and yield strategy selection legible to users without a DeFi background.

Several iterations later, we’d broken the complex actions into smaller steps and added contextual hints at the points where users were most likely to get lost. The flows became something a non-expert could move through without second-guessing every decision.

Those wireframes became the foundation the UI design built on.

We explored two visual directions through moodboards before committing to one.

The first was light and clean — modern, minimal, geometric, with accent colours that drew the eye without overwhelming. The second went darker and more digital: bold, detailed, technical, with immersive 3D illustrations that leaned into the crypto aesthetic.

The client aligned around the light concept. For a product built on transparency and trust, a clean visual language made more sense than one that signalled complexity — especially for users already navigating unfamiliar financial territory.