Before joining KAKI, I have been doing NFT and game products in Mix Marvel. My job always has to be to make the products easy to understand and interact with. In April 2021, when I saw KAKI’s product, KAKI already had its MVP(minimum viable product) — — — the binary option. But binary option are more like putting some centralized exchange’s trading data on the blockchain.
After listening to Byron’s (CEO of KAKI) description of KAKI, I was very excited because they were making a very pioneering and innovative Defi product! This is not just adding a cool UI or interactive interface to the product, but turning a complex option into simple and interesting trading games, which sounds really cool to me!
Keep in mind that many Defi, NFT, and game projects choose to fork a particular project to save time and develop costs. Very few teams are willing to build a product. When faced with the two easy and hard paths, the KAKI team chose the more difficult one.
During that time, I was recovering from a medical condition. So I could only advise the KAKI team via Facetime or Zoom. Later on, KAKI made a new website and some KAKI IPs according to my ideas and guidance, but I think it lacked a background story to support the product’s universe. The KAKI universe felt isolated and lacked a soul of great Defi products.
In June 2021, Byron offered me to officially join the KAKI team. He told me I could use my design skills in the field of games and NFT to create a universal image of KAKI. I thought KAKI could be made as fun as a game, adding all kinds of visuals and sounds, but KAKI would still be a Defi option product at its core. It was something that pushed me out of my comfort zone and I found it very challenging.
When I first started designing KAKI, I tried one method — objectifying the concept of option trading. This would help reduce the learning cost for the general public. So I came up with a design solution: to present it as a “train”. To this day, this idea is often discussed, but it didn’t last more than 24 hours before I abandoned it myself. Why I did that you might ask?
Because we are all familiar with the “train”, and if we use the train to explain “each block is connected”, it is easy for ordinary people to understand. But the problem is that once the concept is expanded, we need more “ objects” related to trains to explain. I tried to use the train analogy to get my mom to understand blockchain, but when questioned further, I couldn’t extend the train analogy any further and often had to make a new analogy to make sense of it. I also thought of using “bus” and “raft” to represent blocks, and even throwing paper dough into the “trash can” to represent blocks being packaged on the chain. But eventually, none of it works for me.
In the world of KAKI, there are many concepts involved, something like acquiring a price, placing an order, packaging a transaction, putting data on the blockchain, and so on. It is not easy to explain all these in terms of train-related “ objects”.
So KAKI’s design should not come from our immediate surroundings in real life, it needs to be free from the real world and use our imagination, I thought maybe using something showing up in science fiction movies or cartoons would be great. That’s when I realized that outer space and rocket launch base is a very good choice for our whole product design.
First of all, each rocket launch is like a trade on the chain, very graphic! All kinds of options trading processes can find correspondence here! Secondly, It is far away from the real world, we can have unlimited imagination about it. It’s also not too informative and can be represented in a more cartoonish way. So that we don’t need to spend a lot of time and effort on learning the product’s interface. Also, gotta remember that KAKI is still essentially a Defi protocol!
People have never stopped pursuing and exploring space, and the mystery of the universe can give our users a stronger curiosity to keep digging KAKI. This is the main reason why I created a sci-fi background for the KAKI universe that can be constantly explored by players!
