From Swap Box to Trading Platform
How one design system took Sunrise from a single swap card to a full trading product in 11 months.
Sunrise, by Wormhole Labs, brings newly launched assets (crypto tokens, tokenized stocks, commodities) to Solana, a fast, low-cost blockchain. It started as an idea for Monad's blockchain launch: make MON natively tradeable on Solana from the moment Monad's mainnet launched. I joined Wormhole Labs as founding designer in May 2025, and Sunrise kicked off that November as one page with one job: deposit native MON for MON on Solana.
Eleven months later, it's a trading platform with market data, order books, limit orders and portfolio tracking.
Role: Founding Designer · Company: Wormhole Labs · Timeline: Nov 2025 – present · Team: 1 designer, pod-based engineering · Scope: Product design, design system, launch pages, brand exploration
- 117 token launches, up to two a day
- 7 days → a few hours launch turnaround
- 71 new markets in the last 30 days
- $6.53B Q3 trading volume, up 40% from Q2
From a single swap card in November 2025 to a full trading platform by summer 2026.
The Challenge
Sunrise listed new assets as often as twice a day, and every listing needed a page, a swap flow and a reason to care. At the same time, engineering split into pods to build real trading features. Design was a team of one.
- Speed: new listings up to twice a day
- Scope: from one swap card to a full trading product
- Headcount: one designer, several engineering pods
1. Launch - Make Every Listing an Event
Nov 2025 – Spring 2026
Before Sunrise could be a trading platform, it had to be a place people came back to. Every new listing was a reason to bring them.
Nov 2025 · Version one was a single card on a sunset backdrop: pick a token, enter an amount, connect a wallet. It did one thing cleanly, and that was the point.
Client Ask: Monad's Own MON Page, Designed in One Day
Alongside Sunrise's launch page, Monad asked for a MON swap page of its own, in its own brand. I designed it in one day. It uses the same swap card as Sunrise, in Monad's purple. It adds route comparison, so people coming from Ethereum, Base or Polygon can pick the fastest or cheapest way in.
Client ask · designed in 1 day. The Monad Bridge home, route details and all routes, built on the Sunrise swap card.
Planning the Pivot: Mapping the Trading Platform
Soon after launch, the team decided Sunrise should grow from a swap into a full trading platform. Before designing the trading UI, I mapped how it would live within the rest of the site as new pages were added. The first sitemap covered spot trading for stocks, crypto and commodities, perpetual swaps and an institutional API. Each audience got its own journey: retail traders, institutions and pro-retail API users.
By the third round, I'd reduced each page to its single most important element. That clarified the institutional path: public API docs and a sandbox, a six-step KYB onboarding modeled on Stripe and MoonPay, then REST, WebSocket and FIX access. The goal behind it all: build up liquidity on Sunrise tokens.
IA overhaul, v0.1 · A sitemap and wireframes for Trade, Perps and an institutional API, with retail, institutional and pro-retail journeys mapped across them.
Third round · Each page reduced to its one most important element, with the institutional journey in focus: KYB onboarding, an API dashboard, and docs with a sandbox.
Early 2026 · As Sunrise listed MON, LIT and INX, the page grew into a homepage built around whichever token was launching. A partner wall showed every app carrying the asset, from Jupiter to Phantom. The swap page became somewhere to send people on every launch.
Spring 2026 · Same template, two brands. Launches sped up, and each one needed to feel like an event. I designed a dark, branded template where the token’s own art takes over the hero. It added a live price ticker, a Recent swaps panel and quick 25% / 50% / Max buttons. Same layout every time, so a launch took hours instead of days.
2. Trade - From Swap to Terminal
Summer 2026
With the Order Books engineering pod, Sunrise went from "swap" to "trade." That meant designing for people who watch prices, set their own buy and sell prices, and track every fill.
A quick glossary for non-traders:
- Order book: the live list of everyone's buy and sell offers
- Limit order: buy or sell only at a price you choose
- Partial fill: a limit order that completes in pieces as matching offers appear
The Trading Terminal, in Three Rounds
Tokens on the left, chart in the center, order book beside it, order panel on the right. Each round added depth while keeping the layout traders had already learned.
- v1: searchable token list, candlestick chart, live trades feed, and a Market / Limit order panel with slippage and routing details
- v2: live order book, buy and sell sides, post-only toggle, Holdings and Trade History tabs, and a Performance summary
- v3: a Sunrise-listed tab first, tokenized stocks like SanDisk, Micron and PAX Gold, break-even and limit-price lines on the chart, and an Orders tab
Summer 2026 · The trading terminal in three rounds: each one added depth without moving what traders had already learned.
v3 · Tokenized stocks like SpaceX and Micron sit next to crypto in the same interface.
Key Decision: One Order, One Row
A limit order can fill in pieces. Listing every piece as its own row buries the order people actually placed. So one limit order shows as one row. Expanding it reveals each partial fill, how much is still open, and a plain-language note on what happens next.
Design decision · One limit order, one row. Expanded, it shows each fill, what’s still open and what happens next.
3. Scale - Help People Find What to Trade
Late summer 2026 – now
The Tokens page went from a plain table to the page that answers "what can I trade here, and what's moving?" New listings, market movers and tokenized funds all live on one screen.
Late summer 2026 · (1) Rotating banner for new listings. (2) Headline stats: 24h volume, tokens available, top gainer, most liquid. (3) Top Gainers, Top Losers and Most Active. (4) Sortable table with 24h sparklines, plus Popular Funds like Berkshire Hathaway, ARK and Pershing Square.
What's Next
Sunrise is now preparing for institutional clients. I'm exploring two brand directions for the next version: a calm, editorial site for people who read before they trade, and a dark landing page built for trading desks. Both feed the Sunrise brand refresh.
The Through-Line: One Design System
Every surface reused the same tokens (shared colors, type sizes and spacing), components and layout rules. Each new screen built on the last instead of starting over. That's how a one-person design function kept up with twice-daily launches and a pod-based engineering team.
The swap card, five ways: the same From → To card, token pill, quick-amount chips and main button, across light and dark themes.
Outcomes
- 117 token launches since Nov 2025, up to two a day
- Launch turnaround cut from 7 days to a few hours
- 71 new markets in the last 30 days
- $6.53B Q3 trading volume, up 40% from Q2
What I Learned
Keep an organized design system, even as the only designer.
A full design system for a simple swap card felt like overkill: variables, color themes and spacing, all maintained in a separate file. This setup let me switch visual designs and reuse components as requirements kept changing. The swap went dark to appeal to retail traders, then back to light for institutions, without missing a beat. Monad's standalone page took one day.
Because my files were organized, I could feed them to Claude for quick versions of branded pages for design reviews. Each change landed within a few days, keeping pace as token launches sped up through the year.