JellyX —
Creator Revenue Marketplace

Context

YouTube makes creators rich. JellyX let their fans share in it.

The idea was simple to explain, hard to pull off: a creator (say, a YouTube channel with 10 million subscribers) could put a portion of their future ad revenue on the platform. Fans and investors could bid on tokens backed by that revenue stream. If the channel kept growing, so did the value of those tokens. The creator got upfront liquidity. The investor got returns tied to a creator they already believed in. Jellysmack got a new kind of marketplace.

The design brief was clear: make this feel like a financial product. Transparent, credible, understandable. Not like a speculative NFT drop. The problem was that in 2022, anything involving tokens and creators had trust baggage to overcome before you even got to the product.

The new JellyX: built around clarity, speed, and creator ownership.

The Problem

Designing trust into a product nobody had seen before.

This was a two-sided trust problem. Creators were being asked to put their most valuable asset, their channel's future revenue, on a platform they'd never used before, built on technology that had spent two years generating headlines about scams and rug pulls. Getting them to engage meant establishing credibility before asking for anything. Investors and fans faced a different challenge: understanding what they were actually buying. A "creator revenue token" is a genuinely novel financial instrument. Explain it poorly and it sounds like speculation. Explain it clearly and it sounds like a smart investment.

The design team's job was to carry both audiences from confusion to confidence, in a product category with no established patterns to borrow from.

The full surface area of the platform: token listings, auction flows, investor portfolios, and creator dashboards: all requiring a consistent trust model.

My Role & Approach

Education-first. Transparency as a design principle.

I led design as the senior design lead on JellyX, responsible for the end-to-end experience across both the creator and investor sides of the marketplace. My central conviction: you can't design good transaction flows if people don't understand what they're transacting. Every other design decision flowed from that.

We treated the "How It Works" experience not as an onboarding modal to get through, but as the product's opening argument. This is what creator revenue tokens are. This is how they're backed by real channel data. This is exactly how and when payouts happen. Before anyone could bid or sell, they had to understand. That wasn't just good design ethics. It was the only way to make the product actually work.

Early-stage kickoff: aligning the team on what a trustworthy creator revenue marketplace would actually need to communicate to both sides of the market.

How the Platform Works: Education as the Most Important UX

The How It Works sequence had to serve two audiences with very different questions. Creators needed answers to: "Is this going to complicate my relationship with YouTube? What do I actually give up?" Investors needed answers to: "What am I buying exactly? When do I get paid? What happens if the channel tanks?" We built separate educational paths for each — clear, sequential, honest about the mechanics. No vague promises. No hand-waving about "the future of the creator economy." Just: here is the thing, here is how it works, here is what happens next.

The "How It Works" flow: two distinct educational paths, one for creators and one for investors, built before any transaction mechanics.

The Work

Designing a two-sided marketplace from scratch.

Token Economy: Making a New Financial Product Tangible

The hardest single design problem was making a "creator token" feel like a comprehensible financial asset rather than a digital collectible. Our strategy: ground every token in the concrete, specific thing it represented. The token screen always showed the underlying YouTube channel, its actual performance data, its payout history, and the projected return schedule. We explicitly designed out the visual language of speculation: no floor prices, no "rare" designations, no artificial scarcity mechanics. The platform's visual language was financial: clean, data-forward, factual.

Token screens: every token grounded in real channel data, payout history, and projected returns. Financial clarity over collectible aesthetics.

Auction & Deal Flows

Creators set the terms of their token offerings through an auction model. The design challenge was making bidding feel fair and transparent, the opposite of the anxiety-driven mechanics that gave NFT drops a bad reputation. We showed bid history openly. Time remaining was displayed clearly without countdown-timer urgency tactics. Every bid screen surfaced the channel's performance data alongside the bid, so investors were always acting on information, not impulse.

Auction flow and bid screens: designed for confidence, not FOMO. Bid state, timing, and channel context always visible.

Creator Community

One of the genuinely novel aspects of the model was that JellyX's investors weren't passive holders. They were, by definition, the creator's most engaged audience. Someone who bought revenue tokens from a creator they already loved had real financial stake in that creator's growth. The community surfaces gave creators direct tools to communicate with their token holders: sharing milestones, revenue updates, creative decisions. This turned the financial product into something with a human dimension that traditional investment products don't have.

Community surfaces: investors who are also fans, given direct communication tools with the creators they've backed.

Onboarding & First Value

Creator onboarding was the most consequential surface to design. A creator considering JellyX was being asked to do something they'd never done before: put a portion of their channel's future revenue on a marketplace built on blockchain infrastructure, operated by a company they were still getting to know. We structured onboarding to earn credibility before asking for anything: show the payout mechanics in plain language, let creators model their potential returns with their own channel data, make Jellysmack's backing and guarantees visible. Only then ask them to commit.

Creator onboarding: building credibility before asking for trust. Revenue projections, payout mechanics, and Jellysmack's guarantees up front.

Brand and design language: a visual identity built to signal credibility and financial seriousness, not crypto speculation.

Impact

Launched the first creator revenue marketplace of its kind.

What I'd Do Differently

Language was the last mile we could have done more with.