Most people who hold Bitcoin are not DeFi users. But Boar Finance - our vault aggregator app - was built for DeFi users.
You could feel the gap the moment someone new connected a wallet: a screen full of voting power numbers, epochs, and APYs, and a person who just wanted their Bitcoin to earn something, unsure what to touch. And we were planning more vaults and chains, so it was only getting busier. Every feature made the product more capable and a little harder to understand.
Here is the short version, if you have not used the app yet. Boar Finance is a non-custodial app for putting the crypto you already hold to work: you deposit an asset into a vault, and it earns yield automatically while your coins never leave your ownership. Bitcoin is the largest vault and where most people start, but the same app stakes MEZO today and is built for more assets and chains over time.
This is the story of how we rebuilt it for the person who isn't a DeFi native, without throwing away the controls our power users rely on.
The user we were actually building for
It is easy to design for the person who looks like you. Our team lives in this space: we read the contracts, follow the ecosystem, know why a reward lands a few days after the week closes. So the first version of Boar Finance was, honestly, built for us. It assumed you already knew the vocabulary.
The person we most want to serve does not.
They hold Bitcoin. They have heard it can earn yield somewhere other than an exchange, and they want that, as long as they do not have to hand over their coins or take a course in protocol mechanics first. They do not know what veBTC is and have never thought about voting power. The phrase "protocol epoch" means nothing to them, and it should not have to.
That person describes most of the market. Far more people hold Bitcoin than are comfortable in a DeFi dashboard, and if our product only worked for the comfortable few, we were building for the smallest version of our own opportunity.
So we wrote down who we were designing for: a Bitcoin holder who wants their Bitcoin to work without learning how the machine works underneath. Everything followed from that sentence.
The target user holds Bitcoin, wants it to earn, and does not want to learn the protocol mechanics to do it. That is the sentence the entire redesign was held up against.
Taming the complexity, not cutting it
It would be easy to call the redesign "we made it simpler." That is not quite what happened.
The product was not too complex in some absolute sense; a yield product on a real protocol has real moving parts. The problem was that we showed all of them to everyone, all the time.
We were treating one product as if it had one kind of user. It has at least two, and the fix was not to delete the complexity but to tame it: to stop forcing the same surface on two different intentions.
One product, whatever the asset
The first decision was that every vault should feel like the same product.
That is harder than it sounds, because the assets are not the same underneath. On Mezo, Bitcoin and MEZO do genuinely different jobs. Bitcoin in the vault earns a weekly Bitcoin yield that compounds on its own. Staking MEZO plays a different role entirely and pays its rewards in Bitcoin that you claim when you want them. The rules, timing, and purpose diverge in ways that matter to us and not at all to the person trying to earn.
| Bitcoin vault | MEZO vault | |
|---|---|---|
| Yield currency | Bitcoin | Bitcoin |
| Compounding | Automatic | Manual claim |
| Action required | Deposit once | Deposit, then claim rewards |
So we hid that difference instead of exposing it. Whichever asset you bring, the vault looks the same, reads the same, and walks you through the same steps. We unified all of it, Bitcoin, MEZO, and the other assets still coming, under one frame: the same card, the same language, the same flow. Learn it once, and it transfers.
That unification is what made everything else possible. Once every vault behaved the same way, we could split the experience into two modes, Simple and Advanced, and have "Simple" mean one thing everywhere instead of a different thing in every room. Simple is the default; Advanced is the full set of controls, one click away. The app remembers your choice.
| Capability | Simple | Advanced |
|---|---|---|
| Onboarding | Step-by-step wizard | Full dashboard |
| Main priority | Yield overview | Position management |
| Position overview | Summary only | Full control |
| Unstaking & withdrawal | Not available | Full control |
| Default for | New and casual holders | Power users |
The number that matters most: what you've earned
If the product has one job, it is this: tell you, without ambiguity, what your money has earned.
That sounds trivial until you see where the earnings come from. One user might have Bitcoin compounding quietly each week, staking rewards in Bitcoin waiting to be claimed and positions across more than one vault. Some of it grows on its own, some does nothing until you collect it. An honest answer to "how am I doing" has to add all of it up and then say which part is working and which part is waiting on you.
So that is what the earnings view does. One total across every vault, broken out per asset when you want it. Claimable rewards are surfaced with a clear prompt, so nothing valuable sits unnoticed; compounding rewards are shown as the steady growth they are. A yield number you cannot explain is worse than no number at all.
Onboarding, one step at a time
The Simple flow asks one question at a time, rather than dropping a newcomer onto a full dashboard and wishing them luck.
First: what would you like to earn with? Bitcoin or MEZO, with Bitcoin marked as the popular choice for anyone unsure. Then: how much, with the option to use a position you already hold. Then it walks you through the staking transaction, and ends on a plain confirmation that you are earning.
Four steps, each with a single decision, instead of one screen asking twenty at once. It adapts underneath, branching on the asset and whether you already have a position, but you never see that machinery. Picking the right vault should feel like being walked through a door, not passing an exam.
Earning trust before the wallet connects
We also wanted people to trust us before they dive in.
Connecting a wallet is a commitment, and asking for it before showing what someone is signing up for is backwards. So the landing page does the convincing first, no wallet required. A calculator lets you enter an amount and see the yield it would produce. Our historical performance is laid out in plain charts, because a track record you can see beats a promise you have to take on faith. And a detailed FAQ answers the technical reader who wants to know exactly how the vault works, how rewards are paid, and what happens when they want out.
Newcomers get reassurance. Experts get specifics. Both from the same page.
The product is non-custodial: you keep ownership of your assets the entire time. Every transaction is on-chain. Our fee is a performance fee on earnings only, never on your principal — if we do not earn for you, you do not pay.
It is also where we are blunt about what matters most. These are not fine-print commitments buried in a whitepaper; they are the first things someone learns before they ever connect a wallet.
Why we kept the harder version
The tidiest version of this redesign would have shipped Simple and nothing else.
There is a real argument for it: one mode is less to build, less to maintain, less to explain. If you only looked at the new user, you could call Advanced clutter and get rid of it. We kept it anyway.
The people who use Advanced are often our most engaged users: the ones who want every position, manage allocations by hand, read their full history, and handle unstaking and withdrawals themselves. Taking that away to tidy a newcomer's first screen would solve one person's problem by creating another's.
The choice that took the most discipline is easy to miss: we did not copy Advanced's operations into Simple. It would have been tempting to sprinkle a little position management here, a little unstaking there. We did not. Simple stays simple. Advanced stays whole.
That does two things at once. An existing user keeps working exactly as before, because nothing moved on them. And a newcomer who outgrows Simple has somewhere to graduate to, a fuller version of the same product that introduces complexity gradually, when they go looking for it. Advanced doubles as that ramp.
The principles we design by now
The redesign left us with a few rules we keep coming back to.
Never make someone learn the protocol to use the product. If a concept exists only because of how the contracts work, it does not belong on the path of someone who just wants to earn. The mechanics stay honest and available to anyone who looks; they are just not the price of entry.
Make what you've earned impossible to misread. When income arrives from several sources in several forms, the product's hardest job is to add it up faithfully and say plainly what is yours, what is growing, and what is waiting to be claimed.
Design for intention, then get out of the way. The newcomer wants reassurance and a next step; the expert wants control and detail. The mistake was assuming those were the same screen.
Keep the expert's door open. Simplicity that locks people out has failed at its job. A good default is one the person who needs more can always get past.
What this adds up to is simple to say and hard to earn: you should not have to understand the machine to trust it with your Bitcoin. Connect a wallet, see what you would earn, deposit, and watch it grow, all without learning a glossary first. The mechanics are still there for the day you get curious. Until then, they stay out of your way.
If you hold Bitcoin and have been waiting for a way to put it to work without learning a glossary, this was built for you. Boar Finance is live at boar.finance, and it is non-custodial: your assets stay yours the entire time.