A consumer ZK chain people actually use.
Product and strategy advisor on wallet, payments, and data for a consumer-facing ZKsync chain.
01 · The problem
What Sophon actually needed.
Most web3 chains are built for people who already understand web3. Sophon bets the opposite: a ZKsync-ecosystem chain for everyday consumers who want to hold value, pay, and earn without learning seed phrases, gas tokens, or bridging. That bet only pays off if the consumer-facing product layer is good enough to disappear. Wallet UX, card integrations, and on/off-ramp flows are the surfaces where mainstream users convert or bounce, and where regulatory, custody, and partner-integration choices get locked in early and grow expensive to reverse.
02 · Context and insight
The reframe that set the direction.
I came in as a product and strategy advisor at the intersection of my two specialties: consumer product and web3. My reframe: for a "crypto for everyday people" chain, the product is not the chain. It's the wallet, the payment, and the moment money moves between crypto and the real world. My role spans the three surfaces that decide whether that holds. Wallet: the account model and home base. Payments: card integrations that let on-chain balances behave like spendable money. Data: the instrumentation that tells the team whether any of it works.
03, The approach
The decisions that mattered.
Treat the wallet as the product, not the front door
The wallet is where a mainstream user forms their entire impression of the chain. It has to carry the experience, not just sign transactions. I advised on the account model and UX with account abstraction as the lever, hiding seed phrases, gas, and chain-switching so the surface feels like a consumer fintech app. The tradeoff held throughout: every abstraction that eases onboarding also adds custody, recovery, and trust-model decisions that must be made deliberately, not defaulted into.
Make money move both directions, and survive the off-ramp
Payments is where consumer web3 usually dies. Getting in is hard, getting out is harder, and card spend rarely works. I advised on on/off-ramp flows and card integrations so an on-chain balance can be spent and cashed out, treating ramps and cards as a conversion funnel with real partner, fee, and compliance constraints, and sequencing which integrations unlock the most user value first.
Build the data layer so decisions stop being guesses
You can't optimize a consumer funnel you can't see. I advised on instrumenting the surfaces that matter: onboarding completion, first transaction, ramp conversion, card activation, retention. Combining on-chain data with product analytics gave an honest end-to-end view, so the team reasons from evidence instead of intuition.
04 · How it's built
Close to the stack, not above it.
An advisory engagement, not a hands-on build. My leverage was framing, prioritization, and product judgment. But the advice came from someone who has built web3 product directly (Solidity, wallet and intent infrastructure at Pass and Enso) and who reads on-chain data himself, so recommendations on wallet account models, ramp and card tradeoffs, and instrumentation carried an engineer's sense of what's actually feasible.
The work was advisory, so this is contribution, not a solo outcome. My input shaped how Sophon thinks about its consumer product layer: wallet experience, on/off-ramp and card flows, and the data needed to improve them. The consistent argument throughout: for a chain targeting everyday users, the product is the experience around the money, not the chain beneath it.
What I’d carry forward
The gap between technically possible and a normal person will do this is enormous, and almost all of it lives in wallet UX and the off-ramp. Account abstraction makes onboarding feel easy but quietly relocates the hard problems into custody and recovery. The right move is to make those choices explicitly and early, while they're still cheap.