In the late 18th century, a novel by the name of Sense and Sensibility was published simply under the handle of “A Lady.” Subsequent works, including Pride and Prejudice, credited only the author’s earlier success. Jane Austen remained anonymous until her death – a decision that allowed her to sidestep gender bias and be judged solely by the weight of her words.

Centuries later, the world may look different, but the instinct to create freely, without the baggage of identity, remains. Banksy. Satoshi Nakamoto. And now, 0xDesigner. A pseudonym not to obscure, but to reveal what matters most: the work.

As someone still learning to quiet the impulse of being seen and affirmed, the decision to be pseudonymous is one I find equal parts unnerving and courageous. In fact, creating without credit runs counter to everything I have spent years trying to unlearn. And yet for 0xDesigner, moving between physical and virtual worlds came naturally. Born into a first-generation immigrant family, he describes his early life as distinct and divided. “My life has always been very compartmentalized,” he says. “There was one way of being in the house, and a different way of being in school.”

Growing up in small schools, identity to 0xDesigner was more of a fluid state than one fixed in fact — a way to move through spaces, not belong to them. “Being in these tiny communities where I had to get along with people I didn’t have much in common with meant I never had a strong sense of belonging,” he explains. “It was almost like a social survival mechanism.”

Still, growing up in the ’90s meant 0xDesigner experienced the early internet as a space of exploration and connection through message boards, dial-up modems, and a new kind of digital freedom. While those formative years may have sparked a comfort with being online, the desire to create came much later.

As a college student double-majoring in economics and psychology, 0xDesigner became fascinated with what makes people tick, from the rational incentives of markets to the messy irrationality of human behavior. “It felt like I was covering all angles,” he says. “Economics taught me how people should behave. Psychology showed me what they actually do.” That tension, the one that sits between systems and emotions, would later go on to shape his entire approach to design.

His first job out of school, however, offered little room for nuance. He spent his days buried in spreadsheets, where the work was intellectually stimulating, but the culture felt like a mismatch. “Here I was, in my 20s, stuck in a cubicle, getting made fun of for drinking $5 coffee and wearing skinny jeans,” he laughs.

It didn’t take long before the corporate grind wore thin. Within a year, 0xDesigner resigned with nothing lined up. “I was reading startup blogs every day and became completely captivated by the energy of it all,” he tells me. With a few thousand dollars saved, which seemed like a fortune at the time, he enrolled in a then-nascent design program. It wasn’t code he was after. “I knew I wanted to work in tech,” he says, “but I didn’t want to be an engineer.” What drew him in was something more primal: the messy, emotional, and deeply human ways people interact with technology.

The experience clarified where 0xDesigner wanted to focus. “We were just making websites at first,” he says. “That was all about designing to persuade, and building desire before the login screen.” What really drew him in was what came after: the moment when design stops selling value and starts helping people experience it.

After selling his first agency, he launched another, this time focused entirely on product UX. With a background in psychology, 0xDesigner found himself naturally attuned to user friction, approaching it through the lens of mental models and cognitive load. “That was the work I was better at, and the work that excited me more,” he adds.

By 2021, 0xDesigner had checked every box, working with dream clients like Facebook, Google, and other Fortune 500s. But when the NFT boom hit, it upended everything. “All of a sudden, the thing I’d spent my entire adult life working toward seemed boring,” he says. “Worse, it felt like it was standing in the way of something far more exciting.”

It wasn’t that 0xDesigner hadn’t heard of crypto. A friend from design bootcamp had been an early Bitcoin adopter, and he’d read American Kingpin, the story of the Silk Road and its cryptocurrency-fueled rise and fall. He even had Bitcoin of his own, safely stored in a hardware wallet since 2016. But nothing in the five years since had truly grabbed him, not until NFTs. 

“Bitcoin made a ton of sense to me,” he says. “But what came after was DeFi, and while I understood the value, it wasn’t something I actively wanted to participate in.” NFTs, though, were different. “They were at the opposite end of the spectrum and the first thing that really resonated with me,” he continues. “It was crypto’s first consumer moment.”

The fact that NFTs were framed as collectibles added another layer of personal connection. “I was a huge sneakerhead at the time,” 0xDesigner says. “So I was already into the idea of identity signaling through the things you own.” His hundred-pair sneaker collection, still boxed up at his mom’s place to her ongoing dismay, took up plenty of space. NFTs, by contrast, didn’t. Instead, they offered a new way to flex shared interests, connect with like-minded people, and tap into a liquid resale market — all without the clutter.

Coming into the space as a collector meant 0xDesigner understood the odds. He never believed NFTs in their then form would retain their value long-term. “I sat on massive gains in NFTs, more money than I had ever made in my life,” he says. “And even though I never realized them, it wasn’t painful, because I knew they were all eventually going to go to zero.”

That awareness, paired with crypto’s inevitable volatility, became the spark for what 0xDesigner is now best known for: his Design Everydays series. “Collecting for me has always been about storytelling,” he tells me. “But the way I coped with the financial side of it all was by showing how much further crypto could go, if only it had more user-centered, intentional design.” While several others (myself included) channeled that energy into writing, 0xDesigner returned to what he knew best: visual storytelling.

Ironically, that same impulse is part of what led him to go pseudonymous. “I was alienating a lot of people with my excitement about NFTs,” he recalls. “To my IRL friends, I was a total weirdo.”

What most people don’t know is that the rest of that decision was shaped by an ill-fated psilocybin trip. In early 2022, while experimenting with microdosing for focus, 0xDesigner took what he thought was a small dose of mushroom chocolate from a friend. It wasn’t. 

“I was absolutely wrecked,” he says, laughing. “Curled up in a ball, crying, on a random Wednesday at 11 a.m.” Six hours later, still coming down, he tried to get back to work, all while simultaneously trying to claim an NFT using a wallet delegation tool with a glaring red user interface. “Everything was red… the buttons, the text, the background… and I was half-tripping, hypersensitive, thinking: this feels dangerous.” He took to Twitter to rant. That off-the-cuff thread about how bad design makes crypto feel unsafe got 50 likes, more than anything he’d ever posted. “That was the dopamine hit,” he says. “And the realization that there was an appetite for design critique in crypto.”

That planted the seed for a two-year-long daily practice. 0xDesigner’s Design Everydays series became a ritual—part critique, part vision board—for how crypto could be more usable, more human. “I don’t see myself as a consistent person,” he tells me. “But I think a lot of it was motivated by knowing that I could put an idea out there that might prompt a conversation or inspire someone to build something I’d actually want to use.”

What kept him going wasn’t virality, but purpose. “Even if I didn’t get a lot of likes or new followers, I knew I was broadcasting something that might have a tiny, tiny impact,” he says. “And I got addicted to that.”

Calling 0xDesigner’s impact “tiny” would be an understatement. He’s been invited to collaborate with top crypto brands like MoonPay and speak at major industry events. Still, joining any one company has never been the goal. “What made the practice valuable was having permission to take a bird’s-eye view,” he says. “Not being tied to a single product gave me space to synthesize ideas across use cases, and that’s become my creative superpower.”

After two years, 0xDesigner brought Design Everydays to a close, not out of burnout, but because the landscape had changed. “I wasn’t tired. I could’ve kept going,” he says. But as memecoins and trading chatter crowded the timeline, the clarity that once energized him began to dissolve. “I realized I’d lost sight of what made me feel excited about crypto in the first place,” he explains. “I‘m not here to optimize trades. I’m here to help crypto make everyday life better.”

While 0xDesigner has aired his misgivings about the growing trend to turn every piece of content into a coin, he’s since shifted his energy to an adjacent frontier: AI. “Whether it was startups in the early 2010s, product design in the mid-2010s, or NFTs in the early 2020s, I’ve always thrown myself fully into whatever felt like the next big thing,” he says. “And right now, that thing is AI.”

Despite joking online that he’s “pivoting to AI,” 0xDesigner doesn’t see it as a departure from crypto—it’s an evolution. Vibe coding, a term coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, describes a more fluid, AI-assisted approach to building software. For 0xDesigner, it’s become a new medium. “Instead of putting out ideas to inspire others, I can now bring them to life myself.”

The tools may have changed, but the mission hasn’t. “I have strong opinions about how I want to see crypto used,” he says. “I’m not trying to become a successful app creator. I just want to show that crypto can be meaningful beyond finance.” Vibe coding is how he plans to do that. “I want to become the best vibe coder in the world,” he adds. That’s his new North Star.

The future that 0xDesigner imagines is one he believes is inevitable. “There’s a whole new Internet being built right now, and I know there’s a right form factor for it,” he says. “I just want to know I played a part.” It’s a belief that we all deserve better tools—and a conviction that good design, like good writing, is its own form of authorship. 

It turns out, a pseudonym can sometimes reveal more than a name ever could. Maybe the boldest kind of visibility isn’t being seen, but being understood — not for who you are, but for what you create. 

Maybe one day, I just might be brave enough to try it.

Want to read this in print? Drop me a DM on X or Farcaster for a link to download a print-friendly PDF once you've collected 0xDesigner's story onchain.

Interested in more stories like these? Digital Mavericks by Debbie Soon is an accessible guide to crypto and features inspirational stories from 13 onchain trailblazers. Grab your copy today from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.