CONTEXT
Crypto.com wanted to introduce tokenized stocks as a new asset class for beginner investors, bringing stocks like AAPL, NVDA and TSLA into the app with a crypto-native proposition: 24/7 trading, starting from $1, and 0% commission. For beginner users, this was an exciting but unfamiliar product. We needed to make tokenized stocks easy to discover, understand, and feel confident trading.
I was the main product designer from concept to launch, owning the end-to-end experience. A second senior product designer joined midway to support user research and testing. Tokenized stocks launched in RoW and EEA.
MAKING A NEW ASSET DISCOVERABLE
I revisited key trading touchpoints across Home, Markets, Search and Accounts to determine where tokenized stocks should appear.
We initially explored a dedicated Stocks tab, but concerns from the US implementation of TradFi stocks suggested this could limit discovery. Instead, we kept tokenized stocks mixed with crypto in the Homepage for discovery. This turned out to match how users already thought about their money. In testing, users didn't mind the mixture. They saw both stocks and crypto simply as "investments," and expected to browse them together. One participant said mixing them into one list "saved them from having to visit an additional page."
We kept tokenized stocks mixed into Home for discovery, but separated them in Markets, Search and Accounts, where users had different intentions.
- Home: Users are browsing a broad feed, so mixing stocks with crypto created more opportunities for discovery.
- Markets: Users are comparing assets within an asset class, so separating tokenized stocks from crypto made those comparisons more relevant.
- Accounts: Users are managing their portfolio, where keeping asset classes distinct made their holdings easier to scan and understand.
- Search: Users may already know what they're looking for or be exploring. Separating asset classes reduces confusion when they encounter tokenized stocks alongside crypto results.
Essentially, we would mix for discovery, separate for understanding.
HELPING BEGINNERS UNDERSTAND
We went through several iterations of naming, labels and tickers.
We changed “Stock Tokens” → “Tokenized Stocks” after testing showed the latter was more recognizable. As for tickers, we explored variations like cAAPL and !AAPL, but ultimately kept the familiar underlying stock ticker.
On the Market page, usability testing surfaced a related problem: “tokens” is a word strictly associated with crypto, so nesting “Stocks & ETFs” under a “Tokens” tab made users second-guess the asset before they'd even opened it. Some users even compared the price against the traditional stock price to verify the asset type. We generalized the section naming from “Tokens” to “Assets”, a neutral category that would reduce decision-making friction.
Lastly, we added clearer references to tokens across trade flows and confirmation screens.
Testing also revealed users didn't see a functional reason to buy a token over the underlying stock, and without a clear comparison, defaulted to skepticism about the product altogether. We addressed this with contextual explainers on the Coin Details page highlighting concrete benefits, like access to US stocks and 24/7 trading, along with a dedicated label for stocks that trade around the clock.
Even with these changes, testing revealed a deeper issue: users recognized the underlying company, but some still weren't sure whether they were trading a tokenized stock or the actual stock itself. For users who had never encountered tokenized stocks before, the familiar ticker led them to assume they were buying the traditional stock, and they often didn't learn otherwise until the confirmation screen, by which point it landed as a negative surprise rather than a considered decision.
As one participant put it, “if I land on this page and I see ‘one token,’ I think I would not buy immediately. I need to understand the difference.” Knowing an asset was tokenized before buying was “extremely important” to users; interestingly, younger users were fairly receptive to tokenization once they understood it, seeing it as unlocking benefits like 24/7 trading rather than something to be wary of.
This led us to introduce more prominent Tokenized Stock badges and educational cues on the asset details page, giving users the context they needed while exploring an asset before deciding whether to trade. We also changed CTA copy to be explicit, e.g. “Trade AAPL tokens” instead of “Trade AAPL.”
BRINGING STOCKS INTO A CRYPTO EXPERIENCE
We kept the familiar Crypto.com asset-detail structure so tokenized stocks felt native to the existing experience, while introducing stock-specific information from the underlying asset to give users relevant signals when evaluating it. Testing this with users who weren't already familiar with Crypto.com, coming from platforms like Coinbase and Trade Republic instead, gave us confidence this structure held up on its own merits, rather than just being intuitive to people already used to the app.
Analyst ratings, for example, had performed particularly well in the traditional stock experience. Users responded positively to the visual sentiment and could quickly understand what it meant and how they might act on it, so we brought it into tokenized stocks and gave it greater prominence on the page.
The result was a familiar experience for existing users, while introducing relevant stock signals from the underlying asset to help users understand and get comfortable with this new asset class.
REFLECTIONS
This project touched almost every part of the trading experience and required coordination across multiple teams. Working with a lean design team also gave me broad ownership across a high-visibility product launch and exposure to many different parts of the app.
One of my biggest takeaways was that consistency doesn't always mean making every experience look the same. What matters more is maintaining consistency with the user's mental model. The way we mixed tokenized stocks with crypto for discovery, but separated them when users were browsing or managing their assets, was a good example of this.
The results speak for themselves, 1 in 5 crypto traders also trade tokenized stocks in EEA.
