Commonwealth was shifting from Growth-led, manual onboarding of large crypto communities to a scalable, self-serve model aimed at smaller and emerging on-chain communities. As Product Design Lead, I was tasked with overhauling the community creation experience under a compressed timeline, aligning the product with Series B growth goals while navigating the complexity of Web3 governance and blockchain infrastructure.

The existing flow was brittle and confusing, even for advanced crypto users. A core friction point was the dependency between wallet compatibility and blockchain selection, a technical constraint that could not be reversed once a community was created. I led a full audit and re-architecture of the experience, facilitating cross-functional debate around sequencing decisions and long-term implications. The redesigned multi-step flow reduced cognitive load while preserving necessary blockchain constraints, and introduced clearer decision framing around governance setup and token configuration.

From the outset, we were aware that many communities preferred to use their own tokens. However, we made a deliberate strategic bet to launch with a platform-first token model, believing a standardized token could create shared incentives and simplify governance across communities. The redesigned creation flow supported this structure, but adoption patterns made the preference clear. Communities did not want to operate within a shared platform token framework. They wanted autonomy over their own tokens and governance structures. This learning reframed community creation as more than a UX challenge. It exposed a platform-level strategy decision and directly informed the next evolution toward flexible, community-owned token architecture.