Prax is the primary wallet for the Penumbra ecosystem: a privacy-preserving blockchain designed to allow users to transact, trade, and stake without exposing their financial activity on a public ledger.
Unlike most crypto wallets, Prax had to operate under a unique set of constraints created by Penumbra’s privacy architecture. The wallet needed to give users the same smooth experience they expected from wallets like MetaMask or Phantom, while also preserving the privacy guarantees of the protocol.
When I joined the project, Prax had grown organically but this process had lacked the application of a product management framework. There were numerous friction points in the user experience, and several underlying architectural decisions that made the wallet slower and more cumbersome than it needed to be.
My role was to help define and prioritize the next generation of the wallet, focusing on both usability improvements and architectural changes that made the privacy model practical for everyday users.
The Core Challenge
Penumbra is a shielded network.
Unlike transparent blockchains where wallets simply query public balances, a privacy-preserving wallet must actively scan the blockchain to detect transactions that belong to a specific user.
When Prax connects to the network, it synchronizes blocks and scans them locally to determine whether any transactions involve the user’s addresses. This process preserves privacy but introduces latency and complexity compared to conventional wallet designs.
The challenge was therefore twofold:
Preserve Penumbra’s privacy guarantees
Deliver a user experience that still felt fast and intuitive
The wallet had to hide the complexity of the protocol while still performing the work necessary to maintain privacy. Prax ultimately acts as the user’s interface for key custody, chain synchronization, and transaction submission to the Penumbra network.
My Role
I led the product work for the next major iteration of the wallet experience.
This included:
• identifying key usability bottlenecks in the existing wallet
• researching UX patterns across leading crypto wallets
• prioritizing quality-of-life improvements
• coordinating with engineering on architectural improvements
• defining product requirements for new wallet functionality
The goal was to transform Prax from a technically functional wallet into something that felt like a polished consumer product.
Improving Wallet Synchronization
One of the biggest usability problems was the initial wallet synchronization process.
Because of Penumbra’s privacy model, Prax had to scan historical blocks to discover the user’s transactions. If a user had not opened their wallet for some time, the extension could take a noticeable amount of time to catch up.
We introduced several improvements to make this process more seamless:
• background block synchronization so the wallet could stay updated even when the UI wasn’t open
• optimizations to the scanning process so the wallet could identify relevant transactions more efficiently
• architectural improvements to avoid rescanning the entire chain when unnecessary
• quick sync for newly generated wallets
These changes dramatically improved the perceived responsiveness of the wallet.
UX Improvements
Beyond the underlying architecture, the majority of the improvements focused on quality-of-life enhancements. I spent time studying the user experience of dozens of crypto wallets to identify patterns that worked well and could be adapted to a privacy-preserving environment.
Key improvements included:
Simplified onboarding
Traditional wallets force users to store their seed phrase immediately before they can begin using the wallet.
Because many Penumbra users were relatively technical, we relaxed this requirement and allowed users to begin interacting with the wallet before completing that step, while still guiding them to secure their keys afterward.
Cleaner settings and preferences
The existing preferences UI had grown organically and was difficult to navigate.
We reorganized the settings experience to make common actions easier to discover and understand.
Better transaction visibility
Privacy-preserving transactions introduce unusual UX challenges. We improved how transactions and positions were displayed so users could more easily understand what the wallet was doing.
Removing unnecessary complexity
Certain features, such as address validation, had been added without much forethought or validation with users and were removed to simplify the UI.
Results
The cumulative effect of these improvements was a wallet that felt dramatically more usable.
Instead of fighting the privacy architecture of the protocol, the product embraced it and designed around its constraints.
The result was a wallet that made interacting with a privacy-preserving blockchain feel far closer to the experience users expected from modern crypto wallets.
Lessons
Building Prax reinforced an important product lesson.
Privacy systems often introduce friction that developers assume users will tolerate.
In reality, users expect the same level of polish and usability from privacy-preserving systems as they do from conventional ones.
The role of product design is to absorb that complexity so users never have to see it.
A successful privacy product doesn’t just protect users.
It makes privacy feel effortless.
