Kakeru Finance

Overview

Kakeru Finance is a DeFi platform built on the Injective blockchain. People use it to stake tokens, provide liquidity, borrow, and track how their positions are doing. The hard part with DeFi is that the underlying mechanics are genuinely complicated, and the site they had, built by a series of developers before me, made them feel even more so. My job was to make something this complex feel approachable.

Discovery & planning

I started by sitting down with the product and engineering teams to really understand the DeFi mechanics, because you cannot simplify something you do not understand yourself. I mapped the user journey from connecting a wallet through completing an action, and worked out which numbers people care about most: total value locked, APR, claimable rewards, and wallet balance. Those became the things the interface leads with.

Wireframes & flow

I worked in low fidelity first, laying the dashboard out around card-based modules: vault deposits, staking, collateral states, and the charts that show performance. Cards kept each piece of a busy screen contained and scannable, with a clear hierarchy so the important things came first.

UI design

The final UI sits on a calm, neutral background so the data and the actions stand out, with bold color doing the work where it counts. Actions are color-coded to read at a glance, like red for withdraw and green for APR. The whole thing is responsive, so it holds up whether someone checks their position on a laptop or a phone.

Design system

I built the whole thing on a proper design system: typography, a color palette, token icons, and reusable components like token cards, APR badges, dropdowns, and data tables. That consistency is what keeps a data-heavy product from feeling chaotic, and it made the handoff far smoother.

Developer handoff

I gave the developers Figma files they could build from straight away: labeled layers, component variants, and documented conditional logic for the trickier states. I stayed available through the build to answer questions as they came up.

Outcome

The result was a DeFi product that finally matched the protocol underneath it. Complex staking and vault actions became easy to follow, and the documented design system meant the team could keep shipping without losing consistency as they add mobile support and new staking assets.