The brief#
Chia Network, the company Bram Cohen founded after he invented BitTorrent, runs a blockchain that can carry carbon credits as tokens. Each credit represents one tonne of carbon dioxide, or an equal amount of warming from another greenhouse gas, that was kept out of the atmosphere or removed from it. Companies buy credits to balance emissions they produced elsewhere.
Chia's Climate Wallet could already show holders their credits, send them and retire them, which uses a credit up for good. For the next version, Chia's COO wanted a few screens, and the work had to start immediately, with very little time to spare.
That version had to serve every party a credit meets before it is used: the developers running the projects, the traders holding the credits and the companies buying them to retire. Chia wanted each of them able to buy credits and sell them, follow the projects behind them, hear when a project changed and download a record covering every transfer and retirement.
The hard part: a token that carries its story#
On the chain, a carbon credit is just another token, a balance in a wallet. A buyer prices it on context the balance leaves out: which project issued it, which standard verified it, which year the carbon was saved, and whether someone has already retired it. Show only the balance and the buyer has to guess.
Trading had a gap of its own. Chia's wallet swaps assets through offers, files that trade one asset for another straight between two parties, with no intermediary. Offers are powerful, and foreign to anyone used to a plain buy and sell.
The design#
Saif Pasha designed the wallet, starting from the single credit. Each credit became a tile showing its project, standard, vintage and balance, opening onto a page of its own with its full history. Behind the credits, each project got a page with the credits it issued, its history, its measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) data, and photos of the site with a map, letting a buyer see where the carbon came from. Each project page showed every verification period as verified, validated or still ongoing, with an actual or projected volume. Alerts flagged any change on a project, and the reports held every transfer and retirement for download.
For trading, Saif's first layout split credits as a market would see them: those you hold and can offer, and those you don't but can bid for. Chia's team preferred a simpler model, a plain Buy and Sell with offers doing the work underneath, and those two words went on the buttons. An offer builder reduced a sale to a short form that returned the offer file. Later, at Chia's request, the design gained a market page listing the credits for sale.
The job had been planned for four weeks. Chia saw the first full version in less than one. Going through it screen by screen, Chia's team returned a numbered list. Credits had to read in their standard's own unit rather than in tonnes, and only ever as whole numbers. Retire and Send belonged on every credit, and alerts and reports on the main menu. The offer screens needed to match those already in Chia's wallet. During a second week, Saif turned that list into a second version, then the notes from a call on it into a third. Every version came with its own clickable prototype.
The screens all drew on a small component library, from tiles and tabs to a logo per carbon standard, so each round's changes reached every screen using them.
The outcome#
Chia received the whole next version of the Climate Wallet as a clickable prototype, where a credit's tile led to its project, that project's alerts, the reports and the offer for selling it. The wallet was the first project Chia brought to us, and many more followed.
