Redesigning Zebec Protocol

Zebec is a continuous settlement protocol on Solana. In plain language: it lets you stream money in real-time. Payroll that flows by the second. Subscriptions that charge by the minute. Vesting schedules that release tokens continuously instead of in cliffs.

When I joined the team to redesign beta v2, the protocol worked beautifully. The interface did not.

Understanding the problem

The original design treated streaming payments like traditional transfers — fill out a form, hit send, wait for confirmation. But streams aren't transfers. They're ongoing relationships with money. They need monitoring, adjusting, pausing, resuming. The mental model was wrong.

I spent the first two weeks talking to users. Three things kept coming up: people didn't trust that streams were actually running, they couldn't easily modify existing streams, and the instant transfer feature felt disconnected from the streaming feature despite being part of the same product.

The redesign

Living dashboards. Instead of a static list of transactions, we created a dashboard where active streams are visually alive — amounts tick up in real-time, progress indicators fill continuously, and status badges pulse softly to signal activity. You can glance at the screen and instantly know what's flowing.

Unified actions. We merged instant transfers and continuous streams into a single creation flow. The user chooses "instant" or "stream" as a toggle, not as a separate feature. This cut navigation steps and reinforced the idea that both are just ways of moving money — one fast, one continuous.

Confidence through transparency. Every stream now shows a detailed timeline: when it started, how much has been sent, the current rate, and when it will complete. We added a real-time transaction receipt that users could share — a simple URL showing the stream's status, verifiable on-chain.

Outcomes

The redesign shipped in stages over three months. User feedback improved measurably — support tickets related to stream monitoring dropped significantly, and the unified flow increased instant transfer usage as users discovered the feature organically.

But the metric I'm most proud of is harder to quantify: people started describing Zebec as "simple." A streaming payment protocol on Solana, called simple. That's the goal. That's always the goal.

What I took away

Zebec reinforced something I've believed for a long time: the best design doesn't simplify the product — it simplifies the person's relationship with the product. The protocol is still complex. The smart contracts are still sophisticated. But the person using it doesn't need to know any of that. They just need to trust that their money is going where it should.