Navigating the Maze: How Design Helps Users Find the Right Token | Simon Rico - 0x/Matcha

[Music] all right today we are going to be talking about the token search uh are there any designers or people interested in design in the room all right have a few all right so today we are going to be imagining ideating this is all technical talk so turn on your design senses and let's get started before we start uh let me introduce myself I'm Simon I'm a principal designer at ZX and matcha uh Macha is a text aggregator built by zerx and we are enabling users to swap across 9 million tokens uh set limit orders and perform uh cross chain swaps all right tokens got really complex uh and so does the search uh so let's start with talking about uh token search evolu all right 2017 uh the rise of the icos uh there are many interesting projects coming out and the trust of the tokens was mostly built around the founders uh their white papers and the things that they delivered and the search was not really in a bad shape in 2017 in 2021 that's where we've seen layer twos uh they came here here to solve some of theum issues like uh High fees uh low speed and scalability and we started seeing some bridged coins uh for example usdc so what happened uh when you typed usdc into the search well you started seeing two usdc that are visually very similar so how did we fix that as designers we added the train icon it was quite easy um but then Circle started issuing their usdc and they started looking similar again so how did you fix that uh some apps started to rename their names their thickers and overwrite the original names and thickers of these tokens they started sorting them and this can work for some tokens but it's not really scalable uh as there are more than 6,000 tokens being issued every day uh so how did we fix this uh in matcha is that we introduced the custom issued by Circle badge and we started pointing on the right usdc all right 2025 uh I call this era an 100x profit hunting a flat of meme coins so last year we started seeing uh new tools being built like P fun clunker or flch that gave basically a tool for all of us to launch a token pretty easily and with that we started seeing scams but this time like the scams are here before but this time is different uh as influencers YouTubers and politically exposed people started to participate in these scams people that we should trust the token Discovery so there are two types of the token Discovery the one is active and the other one is passive the active one is those are the users that are really active in the space they are active in the telegram groups they know all the contract addresses on the other side there are people that are pass they're discovering tokens passively they can hear friends talking about it or they explore it on the social media and today will be focusing on the passive Discovery so user at some point is asking these two questions um is a token trying to impersonate another token or could I get rocked if I buy this token let's start by answering the first question so etherum is permissionless so anyone can create a token with a similar name the logo or the thicker so uh it can be pretty hetic out there let's say I create this new puppy token on base this is it but there are some scammers that created the same puy token and suddenly the surch is kind of chotic out there and so how can we find that which one is M puy token well we have the contract addresses of course but just look at this it doesn't say anything when it's standing alone and it's super long we are not even showing the full length of the contract addresses so imagine uh your contact app in your iPhone so there are no full numbers out there there are just the names of the people that we saved now let me give you an example uh let's say I know 20 aons and I save them as Aon and the secondary information I see as their phone number so how do I determine which eron do I want to call to it will be pretty hard right and even though I find the right token I find the contract address with the passive Discovery it still doesn't mean the token is safe so now let's let's go to the second question so there are many token risks out there uh for example there's no liquidity meaning you cannot buy or sell the token uh the token might be hot you can buy it but you you can never sell it uh the source code is not verified so there might be some malicious uh code hidden in the source code there might be unlimited amount of tokens being minted and there are many others that we know now and there will be many others that we don't know so what are the token trust signals is it the market cap um not really the market cap can be easily manipulated so that's the volume the watch trading can often pump the high volume is the circulating Supply well creators can unlock new tokens from the total Supply and circulating Supply is not really a trust signal without knowing the total Supply but even though we know the total Supply uh there might be still new tokens being issued is it the price uh price often goes really high before Rock pool so does the change it changes all the time so what are the token trust signals for you well for this we need to learn from the best we like to call this phas we designers like to call this phase an inspiration phase um so how does Google do it like H H how come I can always find what I'm looking for well they're using lots of various things like tracking your his history location tracking your actual location many other data like backlinks air machine learning and deep contextual understanding and there are many other things that are hidden under the hood so what do we have in web tree well we have the liquidity so we know we can buy or sell the token we have the number of holders so we know there's not a large number of uh tokens in hands of few wallets we we have the verified codee so we know there is something not sketchy going on there are other other things like uh if the token is listed on the price tracker or the centralized exchange so if you bring back the Google result ranking attributes are there any alternatives that we can use in our privacy focused industry to improve the ranking of course they are and there are tools that we can use today like go plus Squig Intel block eight or token sniffer that can help us do this now let me spend some time talking about the token badges starting with the warning badge um warning badge is great it can warn you for in front of for for some things that are hidden uh That You Don't See but the warning badge is not really transparent it doesn't tell you if those issues are serious or not and there's the community recognize badge which is also good but user is often asking like who are people behind this community is the community closed or is it opened or are there scammers in this community and there's the custom badge like issued by Circle that we use in matcha but custom badges can get quickly out of hand so we should be really careful using them because the search can get busy and then there is the verified badge verified badge is really dangerous um we don't know what verification means does it mean that the source code is verified does it mean that it's a good investment I'm going to make money on this what does it really mean there are number of products using verified Badges and yeah it can go quickly it can get quickly out of the hand like this example when I'm searching for a Pepe token and there are two Pepe tokens that look really similar they have similar name similar Tickler and similar photo and there are other examples like on the on the polygon scan like when there is a verifi BGE and it says reputation nrol some information on this token has been verified by polygon scan click for more info some information what do you mean some information you're putting a verified badge there you should verify all of it if it's not possible don't put a verified badge there so how to design a perfect search let's start with typing Bitcoin into the search I love this example and I really test all the searches out there with this example but you know what there are some designers over here or at least you interested in design so let's do this together I'm going to start first okay and then I want you to follow so I would like to put there um let's say the logo and the chain icon so what else are we missing here a ticker name what else address contract address yes price yeah price liquidity number of holders verified source code liquidity pools and some Badges and I've heard the the banner well I'm not so sure about this it feels kind of busy to me and the z-shape reading pattern is kind of broken here and I feel lot of these things can happen under the hood so let's start again let's start with the designing the default State for the search so before the user starts typing so we need some sort of input field so users can enter what they are searching for then let's add the the chain selector so they can easily filter across the chains now let's add what's the most popular on in the app so so they know uh what others are trading then let's follow with their tokens so because it's very high chance that they're going to start trading the tokens they already own then the recently searched and a curated trending session section and now let's Ty Bitcoin again so this is what we see on most of the dexes wallets and products out there we see a Harry Potter Obama Sonic 10 Inu as a first result because the thicker of this token is Bitcoin and there are a bunch of other Bitcoins that are very sketchy or I wouldn't trust this so how can we fix this firstly let remove all tokens that have zero liquidity because you cannot trade them you canot buy them you canot sell them now let's remove all the honeypots and the uh those that don't have the verified source code now let's consider if there are listed on some price price trackers or centralized exchanges or what's the number of holders of this token and finally let's sort them by liquidity so we've got from seeing some Harry Potters into seeing relevant coins like RIT rap Bitcoins but we should not stop there as designers we should know the user's intent like for example when the user hovers above the token we can show a quick preview so okay what do we see here so there is the the logo the chain there is the name symbol the the the thicker and there is the contract address and we have some other elements there so what are these so this is the the liquidity and there's also a security audit which is highlighting the number of issues that this token have there are some other information that are secondary as well so have you ever wondered what happens when you type chess into Netflix well as a first result there will be the Queen's Gambit despite there is no chess in the name of the serus but the search knows that the serious about the series is about the bat which became a Chessmaster so how can we apply this in our web tree apps um let's say I'm searching for a foraster token but there is no popular forcasting token or the token that was issued by forecaster but the search should know that there are other tokens that are really relevant to forecaster like d hire Moxy there are others there will be others or we should consider the the social signals like what my friends recently sold or bought this will be indeed a really good signal for me to know that this might be the token I'm looking for and there are other onchain activity that we should be tapping into like my friends friends of my friends the wallets that I'm frequently sending or receiving transactions from nfds I hold or the projects and communities I follow and this is my favorite I would love search to understand prompting so what are we typing here give me a list of tokens with 100 plus holders with 200k plus liquidity with zero security issues launched no longer than 4 hours ago and I can suddenly see relevant tokens that might be interesting for me and I will not spend a lot of time going through the detail of the token so this can really speed up my workflow so what are the takeaways the search should be simple but powerful the user needs to have protection without additional friction so we as Builders need to force for better Discovery and safety mechanisms and finally we need to find a way how to verify the security of the tokens much faster because there might be Millions being stolen from users in just the matter of few hours and this is not throwing a really good light to our industry we will start rolling some of these features in upcoming weeks in matcha but let's build this together uh for our users across all our apps thank you