Projects

Project Overview

CLPD is a Chilean-peso stablecoin that won both the Jury Category and the Prize Pool at the 2024 BASE LatAm Hackathon. In a four-week sprint I led brand, high-fidelity prototyping, and the full design system — making blockchain payments feel as familiar as a banking app for everyday Chileans, while handing engineering a drop-in component library aligned to their exact stack.

The product is a digital token pegged one-to-one to the Chilean peso (CLP) on the BASE blockchain, built to address a concrete local pain point: excessive government tracking and restriction of private financial transactions. The design challenge was bridging complex Web3 mechanics and ordinary citizens — a tool for financial freedom that feels stable, secure, and unremarkable to use.

The Challenge

  • Cognitive overload: Web3 apps typically alienate ordinary citizens with steep learning curves and technical jargon.
  • Aggressive timeline: Designed and shipped inside a strict hackathon window, demanding hyper-efficient workflows and immediate developer handoff.
  • Trust and adoption: The interface had to earn instant trust for fiat-to-crypto conversions while still standing out to a Web3-native jury.

How I Solved It

1. Progressive Disclosure — one primary action per screen

To make blockchain mechanics feel like standard fiat transactions, I simplified the flow to a strict "one primary action per screen" philosophy. By separating steps and eliminating unnecessary fields, the interface actively guides the user — removing the friction and anxiety usually attached to crypto deposits, withdrawals, and liquidity investments.

2. "Simple Maximalism" — a vintage UI as a trust device

The visual identity leans into a vintage UI aesthetic, and the choice does double duty:

  • Familiarity and trust: it grounds the app in established, highly recognizable interface patterns that feel stable and reliable to the everyday Chilean user.
  • Web3 appeal: it taps current Web3 design trends, so the product stood out visually to the hackathon jury while staying accessible.
CLPD design system and component library in Figma
CLPD design system and component library in Figma

Engineering Handoff

Given the deadline, the methodology prioritized a flow that was simple to navigate for the user and simple to build for engineering.

I built the Figma design system to mirror the exact screen flows, with modular, drop-in-ready components aligned to a modern frontend stack:

  • UI foundation: Radix UI and Lucide Icons.
  • Styling: Tailwind CSS syntax and mental models mapped directly from Figma.
  • Web3 integration constraints: design decisions actively accommodated the technical limits imposed by the uniswap-sdk, wagmi, and web3auth libraries.
CLPD interactive prototype demo showing user flow

Outcome & Proof

CLPD won both the Jury Category and the Prize Pool at the 2024 BASE LatAm Hackathon — the two top honors of the event, awarded to a single project. The win validated the core bet: that user-centric UX and an engineering-ready handoff aren't a tradeoff, and that pairing them is what let a fiat-familiar interface land with a Web3-native jury inside a four-week window.

What this demonstrates: taking a product from brand and design system to a working, award-winning prototype under hackathon pressure — with a handoff engineering could build against immediately.

Design Documentation