Designing Trust in High-Risk Trading

Most crypto copytrading platforms focus mostly on established high-cap, lower-risk assets. Newer cryptocurrencies were underserved, despite having large user bases willing to trade them, because they required lower budgets.

Many crypto users start with low-cap, high-risk assets because of their higher growth potential and accessibility for smaller investors.

Copytraders were making investment decisions based on other people's actions. Instead of maximizing exposure to profit indicators, I prioritized transparency, risk, and trader credibility.

Low-cap crypto assets can generate huge returns but also carry significant loss risk. Rather than promoting profitability alone, the product was designed to expose risk indicators, including drawdown, trader risk scores, and portfolio allocation. The leaderboard was created in a way, that it calculates leaderboard position based on all of this indicators together.

For the platform to generate revenue from trading fees, copytraders needed to make profitable trades. This was only possible if they could discover and follow skilled traders.

Traders could only perform effectively if the platform provided reliable, easy-to-use tools for managing portfolios, tracking assets, and executing trades.

To better understand users and their mental models, I started by creating two main user personas.

Rarely used actions were progressively disclosed to reduce cognitive load and keep the dashboard focused on high-frequency decisions.

The client wanted to incorporate a social feature into the systems - likes, dislikes, and comments.

After careful consideration and some interviews with users, I decided to scrap this idea for two main reasons:

- Social validation mechanisms risked creating emotional bias and reducing trust in trader performance metrics.
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- This is going to require extra moderation, user guidelines, a reporting and banning system, and will add another layer of complexity to the system.

The system had a multi-wallet feature, allowing users to isolate traders into separate wallets based on risk profile or strategy.

This introduced a major UX challenge: transactions, balances, and trader performance were now fragmented across multiple user-created portfolios.

Wallet separation gave users stronger risk control by isolating aggressive and conservative strategies into separate portfolios.

I tested different solutions for a clear and easy way to show users all transactions and traders that are assigned to a wallet, and ended up:
- Showing wallet badge next to each transaction
- Adding an option to filter the list of transactions by wallet name
- Showcasing a smaller dashboard segmented by wallets with a summary for each wallet and a list of traders and transactions

When creating a first wallet during onboarding, users had to manually save a 12-word mnemonic phrase on paper (preferably) and confirm the selected 3 words in the next step. That created additional friction but made user funds secure, because with this phrase they still have access to them even if the entire app shuts down.

I tested a few solutions, like skipping creating a wallet for later or letting users create a wallet and save mnemonic phase at any given time, but skipping creating a wallet added another level of complexity to the system and copytrading phase, in which there are already many things to do, and letting users view keys at any time was way too insecure.

Instead of removing friction, I focused on reducing user anxiety through clearer education and security communication.

The project reinforced the idea that financial UX is less about displaying data and more about reducing uncertainty.

In high-risk trading environments, clarity and trust become core product features. The challenges were one of the biggest I had worked on yet, with a multi-wallet feature that showcases oryginal and copied trades for multiple possible copies.In future improvements, I will focus more on user testing.

With that, I'm sure I can make portfolio analysis more tailored to user needs, but it will require more user input.