WALREEL.
Short-form video as a paid-per-view protocol. Sui for ledgering, Walrus for storage, x402 for the cents-per-loop settlement. The product had to feel like TikTok and the payments rail had to disappear — both at once.
- ROLE
- Sole designer · brand → product
- CLIENT
- WALREEL
- YEAR
- 2026
- SCOPE
- LANDING · PRODUCT · MOTION
- LIVE
- walreel.vercel.app ↗
- FIGMA
- ↗ source file
HTTP 402WAS WAITINGFOR THIS.
Walreel's premise — every reel loop is a microtransaction — sounded like a UX trap. The whole genre of short-form video is built on frictionless infinite scroll; the moment a swipe feels taxed, the format dies. The brief landed on my desk as a single sentence: make this not feel like a paywall.
I started with a fortnight of reference work — paywall patterns from Patreon and Substack, the receipt aesthetics of Stripe Atlas, the kineticism of Linear's marketing — and ran two parallel directions: a clean institutional version, and the degen version with neon pink and acid green. The degen direction won the internal vote unanimously and became the system.
A viewer never sees a wallet, a gas price, or a chain name. The whole signing ceremony hides behind one yellow CTA and a haptic. If the user has to think 'crypto', I've failed.
Designed the price tag to live on the cover frame, not in a modal. Cents become typography, not transactions. The cover IS the price IS the pitch — three jobs, one element.
Every empty / loading / failed state was choreographed to read as a kinetic motif, not an error. Vinyl-skip glitch instead of red toast. The reel format earns the right to break visually, so I let it.
Unique screens shipped across landing, mobile feed, upload flow and creator dashboard.
Brief to live alpha — landing page, mobile prototype, full pricing system.
Parallel design directions explored before commit — degen variant won unanimously.
Saksham handed us a brand that made the payments rail invisible — every screen looked like a music poster, not a checkout. That tonal flip is the whole product.
OPENREAP.
An x402-native marketplace where AI agents pay other agents in USDC for queries. Your expertise gets wrapped as a skill file, deployed by OpenReap, then earns while you sleep. The brief was: make 'agents pay agents' feel like a normal weekday.