Fractal ID
Fractal ID (Berlin) builds user-centric identity for Web3: KYC and AML onboarding that verifies people for token sales and blockchain apps without the platform hoarding their data. This was my first role in Europe. Over two years the work ran on two fronts: the product, from consent and identity verification to the account and its rewards, and the brand, in a marketing site that introduced the company's two products.
Consent before anything
The entry point is a hand-off, and it opens with a request, not a form.
A partner app sends someone to Fractal to get verified, and the first screen states what that app wants access to and stops there. Nothing proceeds until the person agrees, and what gets shared is theirs to decide. It is the product's principle made visible: your data is yours, so consent comes before the flow, not after it.
Sign-up then offers email or phone, with no password. Instead of a credential to create and remember, Fractal sends a secure login link, one less thing to fail at the very top of a compliance flow.
The tension every KYC flow lives with
Compliance flows have a problem that design cannot argue its way out of.
Every field the regulator requires is another reason for someone to abandon, and none of those fields can be removed. The requirements are fixed. The only lever left is making each step easy to get right the first time.
Banking-grade KYC runs on whatever phone someone already has, in whatever light they happen to be standing in. A rejected capture is not a bad photo, it is a person who has to start over, and some of them will not. So the flow guides before it asks: each step shows what a usable frame looks like before the camera opens, which moves the correction from after the failure to before it.
Ownership, carried through
The identity product is built on a simple claim: your data is yours, you grant access and you revoke it.
The rewards programme had to work the same way or the claim would ring hollow. So Deals lives inside the account, sharing a sidebar with My Data, Authorized apps, Security center and Privacy, not on a separate marketing page. Partner offers stack under a weekly banner, referral progress tracks live against the steps to qualify, and payouts land in the person's own BTC wallet.
Same principle on both sides of the product: the data is theirs, and so is what it earns.
Two products, one story
The brand side of the work had its own problem: Fractal was two products under one name.
The marketing site had to make both make sense on the same screen. Fractal ID is the identity side, the product above. Fractal Protocol is the data side: an open-source, zero-margin protocol built to replace the advertising cookie, with a blunt public line about not paying for the internet with your privacy.
Related ideas, different audiences, one home page. The navy split hero sets them next to each other, each with one icon and one plain promise, so the two read as distinct rather than as one product described twice.
What this project taught me
In a regulated flow, the design work is not in what you remove. It is in where you put the effort. Nothing in the verification sequence could be cut, so every gain had to come from moving guidance earlier, showing failure before it happened, and asking for consent before anything else.
Five years on, the same instinct runs through the Facilia work: when the requirements are fixed and the constraint is real, the leverage is in sequence and clarity, not in subtraction.