DeFiSafety is an independent organization that rates Decentralized Finance (DeFi) products based on their transparency and adherence to industry best practices. DeFiSafety's Process Quality Reviews (PQRs) are a standardized and clear process that reviews the quality of the process and documentation behind the code. PQR documentation includes the criteria used for rating and describes how the conclusions are reached. The results of assessments can be easily replicated by following the PQR documentation posted on the DeFiSafety website.

Challenge

New Branding and design implementation

The inconsistent branding and unclear user flows led to confusion among users, making it challenging to navigate and understand the product. This poor UX/UI resulted in decreased engagement and adoption rates, hindering the product's success.

Application design and implementation

The design and implementation of the application required continuous adjustments and alignment of the design and implementation due to the increasing number of products while maintaining its functionality and usability.

Solution

Brand Identity

A brand is more than just a product or service; it is a reflection of its values, personality, and position in the marketplace. The brand identity encompasses all of these elements and represents what an organization wants it to be perceived as.

Think of brand identity as a quick elevator pitch that explains what a company offers, how it sets itself apart from others, and why its services or products are valuable.

To create a strong and cohesive brand identity, Magic Powered focused on a range of elements, including:

• Logo: a visual representation of the brand that includes a combination of typography, shapes and colours.

• Colours: a palette that is consistently used throughout all brand collateral.

• Typography: a set of fonts, font styles and typography hierarchy.

• Messaging: tagline or slogan that communicates the brand’s value proposition.

• Killing feature: the unique positioning, its key differentiators, and target audience.

The Magic Powered team applied their expertise in building brand identity and created the DeFiSafety logo that clearly reflects the organisation's mission, values, and objectives.

Storytelling in UX

Magic Powered incorporated a storytelling approach in order to provide an engaging and intuitive experience for the user. In the context of storytelling, UX design focuses on creating a seamless and immersive experience for the user, by designing an interface that helps them understand and engage with the story being told.

This includes a range of elements such as the layout, typography, colours, graphics, subtle animations, and interactions used to convey the narrative. The goal of UX design in storytelling is to create an experience that feels natural and intuitive to the user, so that they can fully engage with the story and immerse themselves in the world being presented to them.

It is crucial to use incentives when dealing with content-driven websites to ensure a positive experience. The user interface is designed in a way that is easy to navigate, with clear calls to action that guide the user towards relevant information. The user experience focuses on making the website accessible and understandable, allowing users to find the information they need quickly and easily.

The principles of UX/UI design help to ensure that the website is visually appealing, with a consistent and intuitive design that helps to establish trust and credibility with the user. Design elements such as typography, colour, and layout are used to help organize information and create visual hierarchies that guide the user's attention. It's important to balance the amount of information presented with the need for clarity and simplicity. This can be achieved by breaking up text into smaller, more digestible chunks and using visual aids such as images, icons, and charts to help convey complex information.

The Magic Powered team managed to create and implement a website and an application that are both informative and user-friendly to meet the needs of both a user and an organization.

Infrastructure and integrations

• Corporate website

• Web application

• User profile

• Subscription model with Crypto and Fiat Payments [Stripe integration]

• Strapi CMS integration

• Integration and data aggregation from AWS, Azure and Strapi

Magic Powered designed and implemented a corporate website and a standalone application website. The web application was built to support both conventional and Web3 means of authentication. The dev team designed and developed a custom system for crypto payments, and for a fiat payment, they integrated the web application with Stripe, a fiat payment platform. In addition to it, the subscription-type paywall was built to support fiat and crypto payments accordingly. Therefore, the team developed a custom role-based access control to offer a more secure and reliable approach to access management within the application. Strapi CMS integration allows users to easily edit and adjust the content of the evolving rating system.

Team:

• Denis Kudinov – business analyst/tech lead;

• Vicky Plashevska - design lead;

• Tanya Donieva - senior designer;

• 2 Full stack devs;

• 1 Front-end dev;

• 1 QA engineer;

Outputs

The brand identity allowed to bring awareness as well as respect within the space. The website was built with a custom backend and showcased specific ratings on products based on the DeFiSafety overall rating process, which includes a 28-question rubric with different sections. In the end, the MP team created a relatively complex website with both desktop and mobile functionalities. All in all, having all those upgrades was a good addition to the guided vision and positioning that have been getting a lot of excellent feedback from viewers.

About DeFi Safety

Web3 career list somewhat has a shortage of crucial jobs like risk managers and/or quality managers. This fact leads to process-driven failures [ about 75% ] in DeFi, such as:

• No information about what the process is.

• No information on how the data were lost.

• No commonality or communication.

• No plan for improvement.

DeFiSafety, the independent organization, provides the following services to ensure process quality, and thus, trust and accountability within the DeFi space:

• Process Quality Reviews:
  PQRs are conducted according to a clear, standardized and replicable process based on a list of questions.

• Pre-Audit Review:
  Pre-Audit Reviews are summary assessments which determine if a protocol is ready for an audit.

• Detailed Report: Detailed Reports are DeFiSafety’s latest Research-as-a-Service (RaaS) product for organizations and individuals operating within the DeFi space.:

• Chain Scores: A score on the specific contract you’re interacting with, a score from the protocol that created the contract and a score on the chain to which the contract is deployed.

• Multisig Certification: Multisig Certification is an exciting new product that solves an important problem while maintaining the delicate balance of anonymity.

Thanks for your attention!

Want to learn more about us?

https://magicpowered.io/

https://www.youtube.com/@magicpoweredweb3podcasts543/videos

Younergy Crypto is an extension of Younergy.

Younergy: A Fintech-Cleantech Hybrid for Decentralized Solar Energy. Founded in 2015, Younergy is a company that aims to revolutionize the solar energy production industry through more efficient financing solutions. They offer Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) that allow commercial, industrial, and public users to enjoy the benefits of having a solar installation without having to make a full investment or cover operating costs.

Younergy Crypto enables direct funding of solar power, with revenue sharing and carbon credits. Younergy's Youdera Saas platform and processes support local installers to offer PPAs at competitive rates to consumers.

Challenge

Branding and Design implementation

The branding of Younergy was created by the 3rd party, which has particular brand guidelines and well–developed brand recognition.

Facilitate a seamless transition of solar panel owners and investors towards the Web3 realm.

The shift towards Web3 is transforming the landscape of web services, and even established Web2 companies and projects are eager to join the trend. However, the lack of Web3 experience among Web2 users and developers presents challenges for a seamless transition. Meanwhile, Web3 applications are seeking support and promotion from traditional Web2 players to increase their market presence.

Solution

Branding

Magic Powered created the Younergy Crypto branding according to the Younergy existing guidelines, palettes and styles in order to highlight their connection and relationship, yet preserving the idea of self-defined brand identity. Brand assets include the Younergy Crypto logo as well as YC Token and YCO2(NFT) Token icons. In addition to the logo pack, the MP team created a number of illustrations and diagrams that support and preserve the identity of the Younergy Crypto product and its mission.

Infrastructure and CMS

Magic Powered team provided comprehensive design, calculation and management of Co2 emissions data, as well as the development of smart contracts and a web application. They applied their expertise in technical design and development to deliver a solution that was both efficient and effective in addressing the challenge of monitoring Co2 emissions. The team's proficiency in smart contract development and web application development ensured that the final product was user-friendly and able to deliver accurate and reliable results.

Magic Powered designed and implemented a SaaS platform, Smart Contracts, and, in addition to it, a CMS (Content Management System) that provides a graphical user interface for making edits, enabling non-technical users to easily manage website content, as well as NFT creation and whitelist management.

UX Guidelines

Design principles for Web3 applications refer to the guidelines for creating decentralized web applications that are user-friendly, secure, and accessible. These principles are based on the lessons learned from traditional centralized web applications (Web2). Meanwhile, Web3 is a new generation of the internet where users have more control over their data and the network is powered by nodes owned by users, not central authorities.

The narrative design plays an important role in educating and supporting the product mission. To facilitate it we have used visualization principles to ensure an easy onboarding stage as well as further interaction within the application. The following principles include:

• Visual Clarity: clear meaning to numbers avoids distortions, needless efforts, or misinterpretations.

• Highlighting the main message: appropriateness of a data format brings attention to the purpose of the data given (e.g. comparison, ranking, etc.).

• Engaging Data: enabling interaction to explore and dive deeper into the data provided.

Leveraging the lessons learned from the Web2 experience, we incorporated them into our design and development processes:

• UX: intuitive design and easy to use for a broad range of users, regardless of their technical backgrounds.

• UI: enable guided and structured design that incorporates guidance and structure into the design development to ensure efficient, effective and consistent results. Interoperability: seamlessly communicate and exchange data.

• Accessibility: support various devices and browsers.

• Security: prioritize user privacy and security of private information.

Architecture

By funding solar rooftops through YC Token in a pool, the participant gets his share reflected by YC Token holding from that pool. Revenue share includes the native token of the Gnosis chain (xDai). Participants are not interested in owning a solar panel, BUT making impact, getting share, and also getting carbon value, which YC can tokenize. YC facilitates the process of funding solar rooftops for commercial and industrial projects, where the processes are smooth and predictable.

YCO2 is a certificate that certifies the participant is able to mint carbon credit from a range of solar projects, their locations, a range of time and kilograms he wants to mint. The visualization is generated from the data that signifies how much carbon was avoided. Minting allows participants to certify their share of the carbon value directly.

Integrations

• Web3. Gnosis Chain RPC: https://rpc.gnosischain.com

• Youdera API: https://api.youdera.com/api (the source of electricity generation/consumption over all projects)

• Carbon footprint factors: https://www.co2everything.com/category/travel-and-transport (used for live calculation of correspondence CO2 emission with average transport emissions)

• Carbon Intensity API:

  • https://data.nationalgrideso.com (API provider)

  • https://carbonintensity.org.uk UK region carbon intensity by 30 minutes timeframes

  • https://app.electricitymaps.com/map – API for future integration, when other regions are online (currently UK only). 60m timeframes

Team

• Denis Kudinov – business analyst;

• Vicky Plashevska - design lead;

• Alena Shorenko - junior designer;

• Marta Draganchuk - junior designer;

• Roman Skaletskyi - co-tech lead

• Denis Krasovskyi - co-tech lead

• 1 DevOps/Smart Contract (solidity)

• 3 Full Stack Devs

• 1 QA Engineer

Outcomes

Transparency of all the coordination actions that happen within the financial layer breaks down financial models into incentives for people to participate in solar rooftops funding without the need to make an impact by owning one. Real incentives come from the model of tokenizing the returns from the energy sources. Very straightforward flow that started with the conceptualization stage, overcoming the next proof-of-concept stage, and eventually launching with ever growing MVP product (12months). Further steps involve creation of new and improvement of current alternative financing solutions through crypto for solar-as-a-service business that is now scaling up from Switzerland to Europe countries. This technology shows potential for solving financial and therefore transactional layer issues.

You offset – we build:

http://yc.finance

Thanks for your attention

Want to learn more about us?

https://magicpowered.io/

https://www.youtube.com/@magicpoweredweb3podcasts543/videos

By 2021 NEAR became a new fast L1 blockchain ecosystem, with a top 20 coin by the market cap. Using RUST as the main language and just basic voting / multisig smart contracts available. The task stated was to develop and maintain the Dapp for governance / DAOs use cases called Astro DAO for the foundation and other ecosystem users based on the reference implementation. Magic Powered took the role of the core ecosystem developer for 1.5 years, this is one of the products developed together with the foundation.

Challenges

Indexing/Access historical data

At the very beginning of the project, near infrastructure has no “easy to use” solution for indexing the on-chain data. All our attempts to build such an indexer based on the existing open-source framework were not successful and according to other users we could spend months to make it up and running and it would require enormous maintenance effort. Attempt to use DB with historical data provided by the community was limited by the bandwidth and was not reliable for production usage. We ended with a hybrid solution that was polling transactions from a dedicated read DB replica, parsed it and populated our own storage.

New branding and design implementation

In one of the stages, a new interface concept was developed by a 3rd party, which had nice ideas though was premature for the development in terms of developer readiness. Somewhere it also led to 14 different designs of the same element in different journeys – a big overhead in testing and maintenance.

Magic powered has to adapt it and release a new version compatible with existing smart contracts.

Align design and product requirements to smart contract capabilities

Initial app design and user flows were not inconsistent with the smart contract and architecture available. Due to a lack of documentation, some of the user flows were recreated from the scratch taking into consideration existing capabilities.

Solution

Partner approach

Magic Powered was strongly engaged in the ecosystem and evolved the engagement model from an open-source grantee to a long-term development partner with a dedicated team/allocation-based model. The model also included the strict deadlines environment as that was a crucial part of the ecosystem and many teams relied on it. Thus our team had to take some risks and deal with complex challenges blocking the development.

In one of the cases, our team has helped to find a critical vulnerability that could affect the whole ecosystem (a security audit wasn’t a part of the initial scope). It relied on communication and tight work with the foundation helped a lot to achieve the needed result.

Team:

• Max Kudinov – UX Lead

• Dmitry Karpov – Tech Lead

• Nastia Emerald - senior designer,

• Alena Shorenko - junior designer;

• Vicky Plashevska - design lead;

• 3-10 Full Stack Dev + DevOps in different time

• QA Engineers

Design Adaptation and Product XP

In order to prioritise and develop the most needed features first we created a power-user group in telegram and was researching and supported the requests from it. The group quickly has grown to 400+ people and all the teammates were there constantly communicating with the market and other developers. Here are a few of the improvements made in the process of the adaptation.

We applied user-centred design principles such as simplicity, consistency, and accessibility, which make ASTRO easy to use for a wide range of users. These principles include the use of intuitive navigation, clear and concise language, and visually appealing design elements. Other design patterns applied include responsive design to optimize for different screen sizes, clear and easy-to-understand dashboard displays, and easy-to-use forms for making transactions. Additionally, the platform also employs security-focused design patterns to help ensure the safety of users' funds and personal information.

Navigation system improvements:

• Clear and concise: Used clear and concise language to label navigation items and keep the number of items to a minimum to avoid overwhelming users.

• Group of related items: Organized navigation items into logical groups to help users quickly find what they're looking for.

• Prioritization of items: Highlighted the most important items by placing them in a prominent location or making them more visually distinct.

• Intuitive icons: Used easily recognizable icons to help users quickly identify navigation items.

• Clear and consistent tooltips: to provide users with clear prompts when they interact with the navigation system or components to help them understand their current location, update statuses, and how to access other areas of the platform.

Proposal Creation flow improvements through the prism of  WYSIWYG:

WYSIWYG is an acronym that stands for "What You See Is What You Get." It is a type of user interface that allows you to see how the final output will look while you are creating or editing content.

In simple terms, WYSIWYG means that what you see on the screen is a close representation of what the final output will look like, whether it be a document, a website, or a proposal. This makes it easier for users to see the results of their work in real-time and make changes as needed, without having to switch between different views or modes.

https://github.com/near-daos/astro-ui

Infura-like Middleware

Our middle was initially based on polling architecture and was organized as a set of microservices based on the NestJS framework and Postgres as storage. Over time this solution evolved into a more cost-efficient solution based on AWS Lambdas and DynamoDB / Opensearch.

The big challenge was to replicate/adapt the relational DB structure and use it as a single point of truth. The Openseach (Managed ElasticSearch) sit in front of the UI and provided extended capabilities of querying/filtering semi-structured data.

https://github.com/near-daos/astro-api-gateway

https://github.com/near-daos/astro-stats-api

https://github.com/near-daos/astro-lake-indexer

Additional Services

Open Source infrastructure has extreme importance but also is a heavily subsidised effort. In order to add sustainability to its maintenance a number of commercial-based pilots were launched to diversify the budgeting:

• Membrane – token-gated solution to web2 APIs (analogue to Collab.Land)

• Stargate – Developers’portal for NEAR

• Moonbase bot – maps DAO roles in Discord based on the tokens

• DAO stats – aggregation service to provide KPI based dashboard for the entire DAOs ecosystem

• Auction – p2p marketplace for NFTs

• Near.js library

Outcomes

• We’ve developed and supported one of the core projects in the NEAR ecosystem (correlation with the token performance)

• Dapp was used by all eco players (Foundation, Aurora, grantees etc…)

• The code base evolves and adds up in complexity after 18+ months of development

• A number of side products were developed and got traction from customers and investors

Thanks for you attention

Want to learn more about us?

https://magicpowered.io/

https://www.youtube.com/@magicpoweredweb3podcasts543/videos