Designers
Andrii Liashchuk (Andy Lurs)
Year
2026
Category
Concept
Country
United Arab Emirates
Design Studio / Department
Tara team
»Tara deserves real credit for directly confronting a trade-off that has shaped crypto for years: maintaining full control and risking the loss of everything to a forgotten phrase or handing it over to a company and hoping they won't fail you. Tara refuses to accept this as the only choice. The elegance of its solution is what makes Tara stand out: it swaps the fragile seed phrase for something as easy as unlocking your phone and clearly separates spending from saving, so you never have to think like an engineer just to manage your money. The visuals, account structure, and plain language reflect a team that took the time to make something difficult feel simple. Real technical skill paired with real care for the user is what turns a hard problem into something people can trust.«
UX Design Awards Jury, Autumn 2026
Three questions to the project team
What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
The hardest part of TARA wasn't visual, it was conceptual. The app combines two very different things: a self-custody Vault, where the user alone holds the keys, and a managed Smart Account with a card. Those work in fundamentally different ways under the hood, but we're building for people who are new to crypto and just want to move their money. So the UX challenge was making the complexity disappear: no seed phrases to copy, no gas to think about, no jargon. The discipline was hiding all of that without ever misleading people about how their money actually works, especially the line between what they custody themselves and what we manage for them.
What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
My highlight was watching an industry veteran try one of our “looks simple, actually very complex” features: aggregating a user’s USDC across multiple EVM chains and sending it to a Solana address with a single signature. It worked so seamlessly that he didn’t immediately grasp how we’d done it. When someone who knows how hard the problem is can’t see the seams, you know you’re creating real user magic. The low point was everything leading up to that. Making cross-chain aggregation feel like one tap meant months where the seams were obvious, and times when we weren’t sure the clean version was reachable. But after sleepless nights and many QA sessions, the team delivered the magic.
Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
In five years we want to be the best independently owned wallet on the market. We compete on quality-of-life features rather than monetizing every user transaction. That's a deliberately hard road; most of the industry makes its money the other way. But we think there's a real place for a software company that earns trust by staying on the user's side. And we're up to the task.
