A year after its inception, Spacekayak has evolved into a studio helping shape the future of the new internet through design. From 3 designers bootstrapping their way to bigger dreams to creating products sharing $500M+ in DeFi liquidity, it’s been an epic expedition.
And the new year seems even brighter.
Spacekayak is a creative team for crypto companies. We love crafting creative solutions for early-stage crypto companies. In the past year, we have worked on crypto research, crafted web3 brand & product design, curated onchain and offchain experiences, and built scalable design systems and practices with founders building in crypto.
Decentralization, blockchain, and wealth creation have been a revolution even before the term Web3 was coined. From the early images of Hal
Finney describing the concept of NFTs to the revolutionary Ethereum whitepaper published by Vitalik Buterin, the community has realised the potential of web3 and worked towards it. Still, the strange fact is that people outside the circle didn’t know about the innovation until recently.
Our hot take: Web3 still hasn’t reached the masses, and the next million users are still not onboard.
The adoption of Web3 and making it mainstream requires the coordination of multiple factors; educating the masses, lowering the barrier of entry, better security standards and regulatory landscapes, inviting onramp experiences, and inclusivity and accessibility, to name a few. Contributing to it in any way is adding a brick to the great wall of history being made in front of us.
Our contribution to it is through design because, in tech, innovation speaks through design.
Too often, design is perceived as only visual, adding the cherry on top. But design is how things work first and how they look later. Oftentimes, it’s so functional it’s invisible, built from underground to above the surface.
Our core team was brought together by this collective inspiration, wanting to bring Web3 to the masses through dApps, wallets, bridges, NFTs and DAOs that are so simple they feel obvious. With this vision, we grew into a full-blown creative team working with hyper-growth crypto companies who envision a tomorrow owned by everyone.
Keeping our mission in mind while we were establishing our core values, we established our design thesis 👉🏻
https://twitter.com/spacekayak/status/1537097316875718656?s=20&t=-ehDNa8DNCvTFDf9-W7pVw
TLDR; we are designing beyond isolated initiatives to create well-rounded web3 experiences for users and a perpetual framework for brands on-chain and off-chain.
New ways of Creating + Delivering + Capturing Value = an Entire New Market
Studio partners
This is where and who it all started with. Our earliest partners, who we started working with pre-seed.
Pillow: Creating a suite of high-quality, secure, and transparent financial products that give users access to global economic opportunities and let them take control of their financial future. Pillow is now a community of more than 75,000 users in over 60 countries and just raised $18.1M Series A!
Market: Market started with the idea of designing financial products to unlock the full potential of DeFi, accessible by each individual around the globe. Today, Market has 8500+ unique users, benefiting from their vision of DeFi and 1B+ in overall volume! Market raised an undisclosed round of funding from top-tier VCs and is building towards equitable markets.
Looking back at the initial days of brainstorming with the spacecrew breaking into web3, and where our partners are today is surreal. We’re super proud that Spacekayak gets to be a pixel in the bigger crypto canvas.
Along the way, we’ve had great expeditions with even greater founders. As their ambition scaled, so did ours. And now, we have worked with household names like Ikonz, EthIndia, Solvent, Onjuno, The Product House, Llama, Polygon, Obvious and more.
Crafting the world’s largest Ethereum hackathon experience
At Spacekayak, we love crafting experiences on and off the chain, and to take it up a notch, we creatively partnered with ETHIndia 2022—The world’s largest Ethereum hackathon.
https://twitter.com/ETHIndiaco/status/1597108754087956480
Our intention with ETHIndia was to simulate the best hacking experience for over 2000+ hackers.
All our designs were crafted following the narrative of Ethereum as the infinite garden, which insinuates that more than a technology, it is a diverse ecosystem of individuals and organizations that build and grow alongside it.
Over 2000+ hackers from 321 cities who built 450+ web3 projects experienced the magic of infinite garden through the art installations and official merch to the stage that hosted Juan Benett and even Vitalik Buterin, albeit digitally.
We couldn’t be happier knowing that ETHIndia 2022 turned out to be the world’s largest Ethereum hackathon.
https://twitter.com/ETHIndiaco/status/1600360556375916549
Not only this, but while the hackers were busy hacking their way to the top with full force, we worked with CopperX to hack our own on-chain experience curated exclusively for them at Astro Garden.
Check out the astrogarden collection
The Spacecrew behind all the awesomeness
We learnt a bunch of new cool things like using on-chain data for user research, lore crafting for web3 communities, and building headless brands for crypto companies.
I also want to give a BIG shout-out to the communities that helped our entire Spacecrew learn and grow: The Product House, Ondeck Design, Crypto Culture Society, 1729 by Balaji S, 10k Designers, Odyssey DAO, and Phoenix Guild.
Ecosystem Intiatives
To bring web3 education to the masses and drive awareness and adoption, we started our in-house initiatives targeting web3 beginners and builders.
This Week in Web3
30+ issues, 22K+ readers
We built Kabl3, a one-stop web3 resource for everyone getting into web3, packed in the form of a newsletter. As a pivotal moment in Kabl3’s growth, we partnered with our frens at The Product House. Today, Kabl3 is known as This Week in Web3, and we promise to bring you the best of web3 as the editorial team.
The Ramp Show
After bringing web3 to the masses, it was time to ease builders' entry into web3 directly from the people building it. Introducing The Ramp Show—a series of conversations filled with insights, advice, and the experiences of the aces in the Indian web3 scene—a podcast directly from the founders’ lens.
NFTLab
NFTs have been the first-time experience for many getting into web3, why not utilize them to encourage web3 adoption for companies and masses alike, art is awesome anyway. NFT Labs by Spacekayak is an internal creative experiment that did top NFT collabs and design for metaverse experiences.
A year of Spacekayak’s creative expeditions
https://twitter.com/spacekayak/status/1603367148432543744?
Spacekayak’s Eternal Contribution
At Spacekayak, we do things intentionally. We align our work with our vision and then make it eternal.
Working on-chain gives us the opportunity to make our work imperishable; you might leave the company, but your work and ideas stay on-chain and form the fundamentals of something bigger to come. It also serves as proof of work and builds a reputation.
What are we most excited about moving into the next year?
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Great time to think, observe and work on a new design paradigm for web3.
https://twitter.com/huddle01com/status/1597485093828067329?s=20&t=jeB3XayFKZa5YflLfIMamQ
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Moving most of our work and design on-chain and imagining a composable design future.
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Experiments with private DAO for creatives with focus on economic enablement.
So if you like our work and know someone who’d want to work with us, reach out to us at [email protected] to foray into the future of crypto with our creative capital.
You can also follow us on twitter to get regular updates on our work and collab opportunities on some awesome projects we have lined up!