BDX: Building Trust in a Market Where Providers Pay
Answer each side’s doubts before they commit
A first-time client was asked to trust an offer that broke a familiar rule, wrapped in unfamiliar terms like DataCap, wallets, and smart contracts. Each side had its own questions before committing:
- Data Clients: Why would anyone pay me? Can I trust this provider? When do I get paid?
- Storage Providers: Is this dataset worth a bid? Do I qualify? What do I owe if I win?
The constraints were one designer, four weeks, and a distributed international team. If clients could not believe the incentive, they would leave before reaching an auction.
Let the market prove the incentive
Copy alone could not make “providers pay you” believable, so I let market activity show it. The homepage led with live figures: data stored, total bids in FIL, and average price per TiB by region. The full explanation stayed one click away in the FAQ. The trade-off was that this proof only works once the market has real activity.
Treat protocol terms as decision signals
Most protocol detail never affected a decision, so each Web3 term appeared only where it changed the next step. FIL showed as an amount and arrival date at payment, DataCap as a clear answer at eligibility, the wallet as identity at sign-in, and contract logic as deal status.
Two roles, shared deal objects
Each role got its own journey, built on the same objects: auction, bid, dataset, provider profile, wallet, and status. A client saw the exact bid a provider submitted, with the same status. Shared facts built trust on both sides and let one designer cover both roles in four weeks, but it meant designing every component for two viewpoints.
Bring real datasets onto Filecoin
- Data clients used BDX to find providers and move public datasets onto Filecoin.
- The design system carried later flows and extended to investor and event materials.
- Starboard co-hosted Data Onboarding Day with Protocol Labs at FIL Singapore 2022, and I designed its online and offline materials.
Build the content system early
BDX was later sunset after Filecoin’s incentive and governance rules changed. The project taught me that when people are asked to trust an unfamiliar market, the interface has to carry the trust signals. If I did it again, I would build a content system from the start. Explaining terms in context across many screens, plus a shared glossary, would have kept the language consistent as the product grew.
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