AI Trading,
Zero Friction.
Bringing AI-powered perps trading to the Telegram timeline with a three-tap UX.
The Context
By Q4 2024, the crypto market was surging, and Telegram had cemented itself as the undisputed town square for Web3. Millions of users were sharing market alpha in group chats, but when it came time to actually execute a trade, the friction was massive.
10x.Trade was built to bridge this gap. We designed an AI-powered Telegram mini-app tailored for crypto "degens," bringing perpetuals (perps) trading directly into the chat interface. 10x makes futures trading as easy and fun as buying a memecoin. By combining AI, social insights, and a gamified experience, we remove the fear and frustration of getting started, so anyone can amplify gains with conviction and profit in any market. No stress, no guesswork, just smarter trading made simple.
The Challenge
The core problem wasn't a lack of interest in perps; it was a lack of accessibility.
For the average retail trader, deciphering complex Technical Analysis (TA) and candlestick charts is overwhelming. Trading perps relied entirely on guesswork, leading to poor decisions and high anxiety. We needed to democratize TA and make it readable at a glance.
Furthermore, we were targeting an audience highly skeptical of connecting their primary wallets to new, untested DApps. We had to design an experience that felt culturally native to the crypto space, yet exuded enough operational trust for users to securely deposit funds.
The Branding Battleground
I led the Creative Direction, UI design, and all marketing and social graphics.
When I first took on the project, the client lacked a clear visual direction. We cycled through multiple frustrating iterations that weren't hitting the mark. The breakthrough came when I stopped sending static concepts and built an animated presentation. I pitched a bold, highly adaptable "X" logo — designed to take up maximum real estate wherever it was placed, making it aggressively visible and impossible to ignore. Once they saw the branding in motion, the visual identity clicked instantly.
Remove the Charts. Automate the Analysis.
We realized our users didn't want to decipher complex charts; they just wanted to know which way the market was leaning.
Instead of building a daunting candlestick interface, we created a visual dictionary of technical indicators. We took historically complex concepts — like the "Golden Cross," "Death Cross," and "Mean Reversion" — and translated them into simple, glowing neon graphics tagged with a binary Bullish or Bearish signal.
Inside the Terminal UI, we highlighted the specific technical indicator triggered and provided a plain-English translation from our AI mascot. This approach didn't just simplify trading; it actively promoted technical education without the cognitive overload.
The Viral UX
We turned our core philosophy into a frictionless Telegram UX, engineering out every drop-off point while baking in a viral growth loop.
The 3-Tap Flow
Navigating via a hyper-simple bottom bar, users could jump into the Terminal, select Long or Short, allocate their investment, set their multiplier, and swipe to confirm.
Social Proof & FOMO
A subtle toast notification showing that "jordanbelfo... went Short with $100" created a bustling, trading-floor atmosphere right inside the mini-app.
The Viral Growth Engine
We designed a post-trade sharing mechanism that automatically generated a bold, highly stylized graphic of a user's position. By incentivizing users with extra XP points to share these flexes on Twitter, we turned our user base into a decentralized marketing team.
The Referral System
To capitalize on this social momentum, we built a gamified referral dashboard allowing users to track their invites and the passive rewards they earned from their friends' trades.
A Constraint that Shaped the Design
To solve the massive hurdle of wallet anxiety, we bypassed direct wallet connections and designed an internal funding model. However, handling crypto transactions inside a Telegram mini-app is precarious — if a user closes the app or loses connection, they panic about their funds.
We solved this by designing a persistent, asynchronous two-screen flow with hyper-transparent copy. Because the process was independent of the active screen, users could close the app and return later to find it still working. To eliminate "loading anxiety," we built a highly sophisticated, granular loading indicator. Instead of a generic spinner, users saw exactly where their trade was in the pipeline (Receiving trade → Sending to exchange → Awaiting confirmation), providing immediate clarity if an error occurred.
The Shift
The UX, branding, and viral social loops did exactly what they were designed to do: capture attention, eliminate onboarding friction, and organically spread across Web3 Twitter.
The app's design, referral engine, and Twitter integration were massive top-of-funnel successes, driving over a million impressions. While the underlying AI prediction model ultimately struggled to maintain the accuracy needed for long-term retention, the project proved a crucial UX thesis: If you remove the cognitive load of TA, build trust through transparent UI states, and bake in rewarding social mechanics, retail users will eagerly adopt complex trading tools.
What Stayed with Me
This project reinforced how much heavy lifting UI and UX can do in the Web3 space. Trust isn't just built on smart contracts; it's built on clear micro-copy and allowing a transaction to survive a closed app window. We built a highly functional bridge that made the hardest parts of crypto feel like an accessible, multiplayer game.
Overview
Scope of work