Hi there, I’m Nuno from Bluewallet, a Bitcoin wallet. I’m a UX and Product Designer. And for the last couple of years Bitcoin has been a daily passion, an obsession, and the most exciting thing I’ve come across, since I first connected to the internet.

Usually when I start talking about Bitcoin with my friends, the conversation always goes along the lines of:

Them: “ohh, you are on that shit, have you made some money yet? What about Ripple…?” (lol…).

Me: “It’s not about that, you see, bitcoin is a protocol where you can build things on top of.”

Them: “Really…!? I’m not following”

Me: “Heya, imagine the internet, and services like gmail, facebook and so on. But the internet of money!”

… Crickets***…!

Explaining Bitcoin to your friends is not that simple. The tech is at a very early stage and still has flawed concepts all over the place.

For example:

Wallets that don’t keep Coins, but Keys instead.

Addresses that are numbers and letters that no one can read.

Early this year, after some time of studying Bitcoin daily, I started looking for open source projects to collaborate on. Long story short, Igor Korsakov, an experienced bitcoin developer found me. After some discussions we were a team building what we think will be the next generation of a bitcoin wallet. Later this year, Marcos Rodriguez found our project on Github and immediately joined the team.

Ok, fu** we are a team of 3 people, how amazing is that??!!

It is pretty cool, but trying to build a wallet with a remote team that has never worked together is not easier than explaining what bitcoin is to your friends. Truth is, most wallets suck and the best examples out there are not really there yet or even close to what the technology allows. For sure what the user experience should be, or will be in the future, doesn’t exist yet, and there’s no one who can tell you what it will look like.

What should a wallet be?

What will a wallet be in 10 years?

Should a wallet display fiat currencies?

Should an address be a wallet?

Should we encrypt everything?

Is touch ID secure?

Is the lightning network ready anytime soon?

How do we get rid of QR codes?

How do we get rid of addresses?

Should a user run their own node?

Can you add a node inside a phone?

Should we allow people to buy Bitcoin? Oh shit how do you do that?

The amount of uncertainty, questions without answers, flawed concepts on the protocol, for sure, don’t help. But having an idea of the direction we should go to, certainly helps. That is what I’m going to try to write about, a glimpse on how I see the UX on Bitcoin will go in the future.

Where we are at the moment.

We just started, and after hacking our wallet in React Native (props to Igor), we are now redesigning the main experience and trying to step up the game on what the basic expectations from a user should be for a Bitcoin wallet.

Our first Prototype in Production