HODL: Bitcoin for Designers

Most design work lives inside systems someone else already built. You make the button better, the flow smoother, the onboarding warmer. The work is real, it matters, but the foundations aren't yours to touch.
Most designers spend entire careers inside those boundaries without ever questioning whether there's another kind of problem out there. One where the patterns haven't settled yet, where the rules are still being argued over, and where the decisions you make as a designer have consequences that are unusually direct and unusually human.
Bitcoin is one of those spaces. A design problem most designers have never had a reason to look at... not because it's irrelevant, but because the noise around it has made it easy to dismiss. The price memes, the speculation, the whole circus of crypto makes it reasonable to just look away.
But...
Underneath all of that is something worth examining: real people using software to move and protect money they can't afford to lose, and interfaces that are still, genuinely, being figured out.
You don't need to understand Bitcoin to see what's broken in it. You just need to look at it the way you already look at everything else.
And that is the premise of HODL. You walk in with your eyes. We hand you the case. And for the next five hours, we investigate together... not as students receiving information, but as designers doing what designers do when a problem is actually interesting.
NOTE: When we say Bitcoin, we mean Bitcoin only. Not crypto, not blockchain, not web3 buzzwords. Just Bitcoin. We believe it's the hardest, most fascinating design problem in digital money.
Paper: Yelloey, I'm Paper. Seven years into design, five into copywriting, and somewhere along the way I fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and never really came back up. I've been building in India's Bitcoin ecosystem since early 2023 as part of Bitshala, contributing to the Bitcoin Design Community, the Summer of Bitcoin design bootcamp, and the Bitcoin Dev Project. Right now I run Bitspace, a Bitcoin-only hackerspace and community in Bengaluru. HODL is the result of two designers meeting at Bitspace, and I've facilitated all four pilot workshops we've run so far.
Veronika: And there's Veronika, who co-founded HODL with me and is honestly one of the most impressive designers I know. She's one of the very few open source designers in India actually working on Bitcoin: contributing to Cashu, OpenPleb, and Zeus. She also was one of four residents of the BOB Space Usability Cohort 2025. She co-built the entire curriculum and workshop structure with me, and has been in the room for every single pilot we've run. HODL wouldn't exist the way it does without her.
Think of this as a design investigation. You're not here to just learn theory... you're here to examine the evidence, find what's broken, and look for better answers.
The investigation will run in three phases.
First, we build the case together. What money actually is, what makes it work or fail, and why the design decisions in this particular space carry more weight than most. There are no slides, just conversation & QnA.
Second, you get your hands on it. Real wallets, real tasks, no tutorials and no hand-holding. The point of bringing fresh eyes to a problem like this is exactly that they're fresh... you'll catch things that people who've been staring at it for years have stopped seeing.
Lastly, the room teaches itself. Each team presents what they found: what confused them, what felt broken, what they'd change and why.
Not mastery. Nobody becomes a Bitcoin UX expert in a single afternoon. But you'll leave with a clearer way of seeing the design landscape around money, a set of questions you probably haven't asked before, and maybe the realization that this space is way more interesting than you assumed.
If it clicks, great. If it doesn't, you'll still leave with a weirdly sticky thought about how casually we trade our financial privacy for convenience.
If you're tired of designing the same funnels and landing pages. If you're craving a design problem that feels genuinely new. If you've heard about Bitcoin but never really understood why people care... you'll fit right in.
Skepticism is welcome, curiosity is required, no prior knowledge needed.
Seats are limited to 10 people. We want this to feel like a conversation, not a lecture hall.
RSVP to attend - your spot won't be confirmed yet. We'll reach out on WhatsApp within 24 hours to confirm your seat, and from there you pay a ₹333 refundable seat deposit to lock it in. Once that's done, we'll approve your registration, send the confirmation, and add you to the pre-workshop WhatsApp group.
The ₹333 comes back to you at the end of the workshop. Need to cancel? Let us know at least 24 hours before and your deposit will be refunded.
Why the manual process? Because we care about who's in the room. This isn't a webinar... it's a small group investigation, and we want everyone there to be genuinely curious, not just casually interested.
Come curious, leave with a different lens.
That’s the whole point.
This is HODL - Hands On Design Lab: a space for designers to investigate Bitcoin without hype, pressure, or expectations. Just honest problems, open minds, and a case worth cracking.
For any queries or doubts reach out to me (Paper) on: