ACM · DeFi · Atlantus • 2025
Designing trust for an asset class that didn't exist yet.
Whales move charts. Projects die before they ship. ACM converts raw token exposure into time-locked ETF positions that trade OTC, removing sell pressure without removing liquidity. Embedded with Atlantus's protocol team as sole designer, I owned the full product surface: how these instruments get created, discovered, managed, and traded.
ACM Market · Live
247 projectsTVL
$48M
Users (7d)
12.4K
CHLZ Minted
6,842
DCA TVL
$18.6M
The Problem
A project founder with 10M tokens wants to take profit. They sell on the open market, the chart craters, their community panics, and the project loses more value than they gained. The alternative is holding forever, which locks up capital they need to build. CHLZ ETFs are the third option: bundle tokens into a time-locked basket, mint it as an NFT, sell that NFT OTC. The chart never moves. The design challenge: help someone trust a system that will act autonomously with their funds for months.
ETF Builder
This is where a CHLZ ETF gets created. Select 1–10 tokens, configure DCA settings, choose cycle duration, mint. The audience ranges from retail investors who've never touched DeFi to institutional market makers running eight-figure positions. The same flow had to serve both without condescending to either.
↑ Interactive — Select tokens, configure DCA rate, set cycle duration, mint as NFT.
Market Dashboard
ACM's front door. Investors land here to discover projects, track prices, and access portfolio actions without leaving the view. The benchmark was CoinMarketCap-level information density, but for an audience that includes people who've never read a candlestick chart.
↑ Click any row to expand. Filter by ETF eligibility, time period, top gainers.
Portfolio Manager
A minted ETF isn't static. It matures, earns, and can be traded or force-quit. The portfolio view surfaces what matters at each stage: maturity countdowns, DCA progress, current value vs. principal. Early withdrawal penalties are shown before any destructive action, not after.
↑ Interactive — Expand any position to access listing, fractional sale, or force quit.
Reef Marketplace
Where CHLZ ETFs trade OTC. Sellers list positions, buyers purchase. Zero price impact on the underlying tokens. The catch: nobody has ever bought a time-locked NFT basket before. Every listing had to answer “what am I actually getting?” at a glance: token composition, time remaining, current value vs. mint price, projected payout at maturity.
↑ Interactive — Expand any listing to see seller, settlement terms, and purchase action.
SXRN Simulator
SXRN AI manages DCA execution across all CHLZ ETFs. Before committing capital, investors need to see what happens. Not just in the best case, but when the market drops 40% six months in. The simulator projects payouts across bull, base, and bear scenarios, and shows the early withdrawal penalty upfront. Honesty here is what earns the click on “Mint.”
↑ Interactive — Bull/Base/Bear scenarios calculated from DCA rate, principal, and cycle length. Early withdrawal penalty shown automatically.
Project Screening
Not every project qualifies for CHLZ listing. Before this tool, teams applied blind and got rejected with no explanation. The screening tool flips that. Teams self-assess against visible criteria before submitting: market cap, use case, utility, team size, social presence. Score 4+ and you're routed to mETF. Below that, you go to iETF. No project is rejected. They're just routed differently.
Below 4 → iETF listing
No project is rejected — only routed.
↑ Interactive — Score updates live. 4+ qualifies for mETF. Below 4 routes to iETF.
Design Decisions
The simulator wasn't optional
Users didn't know whether CHLZ behaved like staking, futures, or an NFT, because it's none of those things exactly. Without a simulator showing projected returns across scenarios, the ETF builder had a 34% abandonment rate at the configuration step. The simulator made the abstract concrete before any capital was committed.
One platform, not three products
The original Atlantus stack was three separate interfaces: wallet, ETF builder, marketplace. Creating an ETF and listing it for sale required three logins, two context switches, and a copy-pasted contract address. Collapsing them into one dApp wasn't a design preference. It was the only way the core workflow could function.
Penalties before buttons, not after
Early exit from a CHLZ ETF carries a real financial penalty. The first design put the penalty in a confirmation modal. Users felt blindsided. The fix was showing the penalty calculation, forfeited DCA distributions, and maturity comparison inline, before the exit button is even clickable. Informed exits, not prevented ones.
Outcomes
Platform consolidation. Wallet, ETF, and marketplace unified in a single dApp.
Task completion rate on ETF creation flow across 22 usability participants, including first-time DeFi users.
Chart impact on underlying tokens from OTC CHLZ trades.
Average time from account creation to first minted ETF across usability sessions.
Reflection
When you're designing for an asset class that doesn't have a mental model yet, every familiar pattern becomes a trap. Early versions of the ETF builder borrowed from DeFi staking interfaces: lock period, APY projections, a big green button. Users kept asking “when do I get my tokens back?” because the framing told them this was staking. It wasn't. The breakthrough was stripping out every borrowed metaphor and letting CHLZ be its own thing, explained on its own terms. The simulator did the heaviest lifting there. Once people could see projected outcomes across scenarios, they stopped trying to pattern-match and started evaluating the actual instrument. If I did this again, I'd build the simulator first and let it inform the creation flow, not the other way around.