Designing trust into a space that had none

When NFTs hit the mainstream in 2021, the marketplaces that existed were built by crypto natives for crypto natives. OpenSea and Rarible assumed you already understood wallets, gas fees, and blockchain provenance. Ferriswheel had built its reputation on the opposite - making crypto trading feel safe and approachable for people who were new to it. The founders wanted to bring that same simplicity to NFTs.

I surveyed 327 of Ferriswheel's existing users and interviewed 12 in depth. The research confirmed what we suspected but sharpened it: users weren't just unfamiliar with NFTs, they were actively sceptical. They'd looked at existing marketplaces and bounced. They didn't understand where the value came from, didn't trust what they were buying was real, and didn't have the vocabulary to ask the right questions.

The research pointed to three things that had to be true for Ferriswheel's users to spend money on an NFT: they needed to understand what they were buying, they needed to trust that it was legitimate, and they needed the platform to narrow the field rather than show them everything at once.

The marketplace was designed around all three. A feed - deliberately borrowing from patterns users already understood - replaced the grid-of-everything approach that other marketplaces used. Collections were curated rather than open-listed. Verification was prominent and explained, not just a badge. And "Boosted NFTs" - collections Ferriswheel had vetted and could offer with reduced fees - gave users a clear starting point when they didn't know where to begin.

The purchase flow was designed to feel like e-commerce, not DeFi. Cart, payment with a credit card, confirmation. No wallet connection required upfront, no gas fee anxiety. The complexity was still there underneath, but the interface didn't expose it until you needed it.

As the NFT marketplace took shape, my remit expanded to the trading platform itself - the original Ferriswheel product. At the same time, the agency Koto was undertaking a major rebrand, and I was responsible for rolling the new brand across all touchpoints.

The trading platform had a problem that mirrored the NFT space: the existing design used a swap form borrowed from decentralised exchanges like Uniswap. Two currency inputs, a swap arrow between them. For someone who trades crypto daily, this is intuitive. For Ferriswheel's users - who the research showed were mostly novices treating crypto as a small speculative investment alongside a traditional portfolio - it was anxiety-inducing and unfamiliar.

I looked at the platforms our users actually referenced in interviews - investment apps, stock trading tools - and argued that Ferriswheel should adopt a "fiat first" approach. Buy means buying with cash. Sell means selling for cash. You'd only see a swap form when converting one crypto to another. This wasn't a surface-level change - it meant restructuring the entire information architecture around a different mental model. The word "fiat" itself was removed entirely.

The redesign unified both products - crypto trading and the NFT marketplace - under one navigation and one design system, with the Koto rebrand applied across everything.

Ferriswheel had a 4.5-star rating from over a thousand reviews. People kept real money on the platform - for some, it was a meaningful part of their investment portfolio. The core trading product worked, and the design work still holds up.

NFTs were what everyone was excited about in 2021. We built a marketplace that took the space seriously - educated users, curated collections, made purchasing feel as safe as buying anything else online. But NFTs as a category never really became what people hoped they would, and the company's focus stretched across too many bets at once. Ferriswheel eventually closed its doors.