In a few months, Balanced will replace loans with a money market. But it won’t focus on a single blockchain. Our cross-chain market will be so flexible, you can earn and borrow across chains from a single page. Here’s how we organised the details for each chain. 🧵

The Balanced loan design shows the price your collateral must reach to trigger liquidation. But that only works with two assets – if one of them is stable. Our money markets will make it easy to supply and borrow multiple assets, so the risk should be just as flexible.

In the signed-out state, the money market design is simple: A list of assets, the amount supplied / borrowed, and the interest rates. It’s familiar and easy to scan, so we saw no reason to reinvent it. But how do you design a cross-chain market that’s flexible when signed in?

The Stellar Summer campaign has finally come to an end. Thanks to everyone who participated, and congrats to all the winners. 🏆 If you borrowed bnUSD and plan to keep your loan open, remember to keep an eye on your risk.

Good design is as direct as possible. Yet most money markets sprawl across as many pages as they have assets. Each page lacks context of your position, is too info-dense to focus, and requires you to do the math. The Balanced markets will spare you the effort.

Most software treats colour like decoration. Something to make an app look nice — or the same as everything else. But our designs make colour fundamental to every interaction. We use them to guide people through an interface and provide clarity as you scan.

During the design phase, there’s always the temptation to add. More colours. More graphics. More data. More features. You want to do everything you can to make it “pop” and show off your skill. But the mark of an expert is restraint. You need to kill your darlings.

Progressive onboarding is the best way to learn a product. It’s like the first level of a game: you don’t want tutorials to interrupt you as you play, nor do you want to get thrown in the deep end. The best games make it easy to figure out as you go. That’s how we design.

A few days ago, an attacker drained 1,450 SOL and 78 JitoSOL from the Solana asset manager contract. A fix has been audited and deployed, the hacker’s wallet identified, and exchanges notified. Only 37 SOL and 76 JitoSOL belonged to individual users, which ICON will cover

64% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. One bad mobile experience is enough to stop people coming back, so countless articles and courses instruct designers to focus on mobile first. We don’t touch mobile until we lock in the desktop design.

The Solana connection is back online and all activities resumed. There’s no liquidity to trade SOL and JitoSOL, but this will be resolved in a few weeks when we launch intent-based trades on every chain. Thanks for your patience.

When we start a new design, we never know how it will turn out. We swing from uncertain to resolute & back again. Through trial & error we learn what not to do, but what if a previous design was better? Eventually, we need to get out of our heads and test in the real world.

Deadlines can be beneficial to keep the team on track But when quality is the target, not time, you have to be flexible. First impressions matter. No one cares if you ship on time if you ship shit. It’s better to take the time to get it right so you don’t waste anyone else’s.

Our Balanced money market design is ready for a sanity check. Visit balanced.network/preview/markets to see what it will be like to supply and borrow assets, manage risk, and monitor your positions. Fair warning: this is an alpha release. Our to-do list is still quite long. 😅🥲

A few months from now, Balanced will transform. bnUSD loans will be no more. In their place: a cross-chain money market. Curious to know how markets will work? Try the interactive demo from balanced.network/preview/markets.

The Balanced money market demo has been months in the making. Easily the most complex Balanced feature we’ve designed. It’s far from finished, but you can now visit balanced.network/preview/markets to get a sense of our direction.

At the start of the design process, every concept is high-level. Raw. Blurry. As we hone in on the solution, we layer in details to improve clarity & focus. Each layer requires more effort than the last. Our interactive demo is ~70% complete. Now to tackle the last 30%... 😮‍💨