From Paper to Real

The problem

Curious Web2 users want in — but crypto stays opaque, from "what do I even buy" to "how do I fund this." Every step is a place to freeze.

How might we move someone from a paper portfolio into a real, funded one — with no moment where they feel out of their depth?

Who we designed for

Not the degen, not the skeptic. The curious middle.

45 surveyed → 16 qualified → 5 interviewed, an hour each.

98% held savings accounts. 91% held index funds. Only 1 in 5 owned any crypto.

Careful people who like what they recognize — not traders.

• Familiar winsNo jargon, no volatility theater. Borrow the trust of savings and index funds; don't fight it.

• The quiz knew themThe portfolio it produced matched how testers already saw themselves.

• Paper was the hookWatching the demo move daily built the intent to go live.

• Curious, but lostThey wanted "why this token" before funding — without being handed advice.

The constraint that shaped everything

KYC required. Self-custody wallet. Almost nobody ships both.

The company's rails require identity verification — so this was never going to be an anonymous crypto app. But Republic doesn't hold a custody license yet, which means users hold their own keys.

That's a hard thing to explain to a beginner. One step feels like a bank. The next feels like the seed-phrase abyss. The value proposition had to be precise enough to make both read as one coherent, safe thing — and that precision drove nearly every onboarding decision below.

The strategy — one ladder, three rungs

Paper → Buy → Live. Each rung only asks for trust it earned on the one below.

• "Go Real" is gated, not pushedThe prompt fires only after ~a week of watching paper gains. The pitch is their returns, not our copy.

• Self-custody, minus the terrorPasskey instead of a seed phrase — you own your keys without the "write down twelve words or lose everything forever." The one place our constraint could have scared people off, turned into one tap.

• Fund it like buying an appPhone-only ID, under a minute. Apple Pay in → USDC out. Regulated onboarding, made to feel like something they've done a hundred times.

• Buying without the spiralOne bundle — 9 tokens, 3 plain-English buckets, split evenly. "Select all" sits right there, but nothing's pre-checked. Fewer decisions, no loss of agency.

Where it landed

The UX was signed off for both flows — Live Trade and Buy Portfolio — and fully approved by stakeholders. UI, visual design and recommendations are with the team and ready to build. Next up on the roadmap: the money rails — banking and deposit infrastructure, working, with optimization still ahead.

How we'll know it worked: paper-to-live conversion, and time-to-first-funded portfolio. Everything above is a bet that lowering the emotional cost at each rung — not just the number of taps — moves both.