How FODL pioneered leveraged yield farming and 120x’d their TVL

I partnered with FODL in order to bring the first platform to offer decentralized leveraged yield farming to the world. During the design sprint, I worked closely with the FODL core developers, turning ideas into a fully functional MVP prototype.

Goal

FODL is a platform that allows users to take leveraged long or short positions on DeFi assets, without liquidation risk, through a decentralized stop-loss mechanism. My mission was to understand what the current pain points that users have are, and redesign the platform so that there is absolutely no confusion throughout the flows.

Challenge

The main challenge was conveying the value proposition to the users; people thought at first that the platform was for farming, and not for taking leveraged positions on DeFi assets. I had to come up with a design that would solve this by offering an intuitive and cohesive flow that would accommodate both new and more experienced users.

Solution

During the 4-week design process, I was engaged in weekly meetings with the FODL team, discovering, designing, testing, and iterating, until I came up with a solution that lacked any confusion and was easy to use for experienced and less experienced users.

I discovered that:

A lot of people were not used to the concept of taking leveraged positions on DeFi assets.
They didn’t quite understand how close to liquidation they are on an ongoing position
They didn’t quite understand how the stop-loss feature worked.

I solved these by:

Emphasizing this was a leverage dapp by including tooltips explaining each part of the UI.
Redesigned the liquidation graph and also included a small tooltip explaining it in detail.
I used tooltips on every element of the UI in the stop-loss model.