Designing the first veDEX platform on EDUCHAIN

How I designed a veDEX that helped bootstrap liquidity on a new blockchain and processed $8M in transactions during testnet.

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My Role

Product Design Lead
Strategy and Research
Testing and Launching

Team

Oluwafemi Alofe, Product Owner
Braimah Destiny, Engineering
Jeffery Akpoyibo, Business Lead

Duration

3 months
(Sept - Oct 2024)

Overview

SailFish is the first veDEX (Vote-Escrowed Decentralized Exchange) on Educhain, designed to:

✅ Empower liquidity providers with better incentives
✅ Reduce slippage for traders
✅ Enable protocols to attract liquidity via bribe mechanisms

As Educhain’s first veDEX, we had to educate users, simplify DeFi mechanics, and design a UI that made liquidity provisioning easy—even for those new to veDEX models.

Total Transactions completed

$8M

in 4 months

Total Users

$8M

in 4 months

Total Bridged

$95k

bridged in 7 days

The Major Challenge

The question on our minds was

🚨 How do you design a veDEX for a blockchain ecosystem with no existing liquidity infrastructure?

Unlike established chains (Ethereum, Solana), Educhain lacked liquidity and user familiarity with veDEX mechanics. Designing SailFish meant:

🔹
Creating a UI that balances power & simplicity - veDEX platforms can be complex, so we had to make trading and staking intuitive.
🔹
Educating users about incentives - LPs needed clear visibility into rewards to commit capital.
🔹
Building trust in a new blockchain - Since Educhain was new to DeFi, SailFish had to feel reliable and safe.

Structuring the Experience

To ensure SailFish was optimized for user needs, we conducted:

📌 Competitive Analysis of existing veDEX platform
📌 User Interviews with liquidity providers, traders & protocol owners
📌 Behavioral Analysis of early Educhain DeFi participants

Analyzing the Competition

Platform	Strengths	Weaknesses	Opportunities
Blast	Strong token incentives	Overly complex UI	Simplify staking & reward visualization
Aerodrome	High governance engagement	Confusing LP flows	Streamline LP staking process
Velodrome	Effective bribe mechanisms	Lacks transparency in reward calculations	Provide LP earnings calculator

While looking through competitions of other blockchain networks, we asked ourselves “What could we do better”?

Key Insights

🔹

veDEX platforms often suffer from overcomplicated designs that discourage new users. SailFish needed to be simpler, cleaner, and more educational while still offering advanced DeFi tools.

The Liquidity Provider

David Okechukwu

📍 Lagos, Nigeria | 💼 Crypto Investor & Early DeFi Adopter

David is an experienced crypto investor who transitioned from traditional finance to DeFi in 2021. He’s always looking for high-yield opportunities but is skeptical of new blockchain ecosystems. He needs a clear, trustworthy UI that shows exactly how much he’ll earn before committing capital.

😓 Pain Points

Hard to understand staking mechanics
Wants clear visibility into potential earnings
Prefers low-maintenance passive income strategies

The Trader

Aisha Ibrahim

📍 Dubai, UAE | 💼 Crypto & NFT Trader

Aisha is a full-time crypto trader who jumps between multiple DEXs, looking for low slippage and high-speed trade execution. She frequently arbitrages between chains and hates when a platform makes order execution too slow or confusing.

😓 Pain Points

High slippage impacts profitability
Needs fast, reliable trade execution
Prefers a clutter-free, no-nonsense UI

The Protocol Owner

James Adebayo

📍 Berlin, Germany | 💼 Founder of a DeFi Lending Protocol

James is a seasoned blockchain developer who has built multiple DeFi products. His protocol relies on deep liquidity to sustain itself, but he struggles to attract liquidity providers. He sees veDEX platforms as a solution but finds governance and bribe mechanisms too confusing.

😓 Pain Points

Needs LPs to stake liquidity in his project
Finds governance participation confusing
Wants a transparent way to offer bribes for liquidity

Bringing everything together 👏🏼

Knowing fully well the pain points of our users, we embarked on the journey of designing a simple and friendly user interface for all users to complete actions on the platform easily without being overwhelmed with too much information.

But before that, we needed all heads on deck to state out the major features for the MVP. However challenges arose with smart contracts by the engineering team and designs already done had to be deprioritized and come up with a new one for the MVP.

Proposed features for the MVP

Swap

SailFish allows users to easily swap their tokens to whatever tokens they want and it shows how they can achieve this. shows transparent, incentive-driven UI that made rewards immediately visible and easy to understand

Farming Pools

Sailfish caters to the needs of Liquidity Providers, therefore they can provide liquidity for the platform in two ways, either in V2, where the pools are volatile or V3 where the pools are concentrated

Bridge

Having seen the struggles users get to bridge their token between several platforms, Sailfish created an easy bridge section that helps users easily bridge from BNB network, to arbitrum and then to the educhain network.

Portfolio

Portfolio shows all the token pairs you may have provided liquidity for as a liquidity provider or bought into as a trader or protocol.

Bribe

Protocols use the bribe to push their token pair to users, this helps protocols with whatever token pair they have on the platform.

Challenges & Learnings

Designing the first veDEX on Educhain was more than just about building a product. It was about creating a liquidity engine that would power an entire blockchain ecosystem.

A week to the launch of the exchange, we had to move from the v2 to v3 farming pool in adding liquidity due to. It was pretty challenging as I needed to understand how it works and design it without overwhelming the users too much information.

By focusing on user-centric design, transparent incentives, and seamless UI flows, SailFish became a model for how new blockchains can jumpstart DeFi adoption.