APIS Pay: Designing Payments Through a Conversational Wallet
APIS Pay was a mobile service that brought cryptocurrency wallets and payments into a chatbot-style interface. I worked on product strategy, software architecture, wallet and payment development, and the path to launch. The central challenge was translating the complexity of blockchain transactions into a conversational flow without weakening the safety expected of a financial product.
Project context
The difficult part of a cryptocurrency payment is often not the asset transfer itself but the sequence surrounding it. Users must confirm an address and network, understand fees and status, and approve an irreversible transaction. APIS Pay sought to guide that process through a chatbot rather than the dense menus of a conventional financial application.
A conversational interface feels familiar, but payments cannot rely on free-form conversation alone. The system needed to confirm intent, revalidate critical details such as the recipient and amount, and make the outcome clear before the final signature. Convenience could not come at the expense of control over assets.
My role
- Product and project strategy
- Software architecture
- Wallet and payment-system development
- Requirements and release execution
Period: January 2019–January 2021
What I worked on
I helped define the product flow and system boundaries: what the chatbot could guide, what the wallet had to validate, and how conversational state should map to transaction state. Those states could not be allowed to drift apart.
I designed and implemented core wallet and payment functionality, connecting account and asset information with transaction creation, submission, and confirmation. The system also had to handle repeated requests and delayed network responses. On a blockchain, submission and final settlement are different events, and the product needed to communicate that distinction accurately.
I worked across product and engineering priorities as well. We limited scope where necessary to preserve a dependable payment flow, then fed technical constraints back into the product requirements instead of treating them as implementation details.
What I learned
APIS Pay taught me that user experience and security are not opposing goals in a financial product. Hiding critical information may reduce steps, but it can leave users unable to understand what they approved. Showing every protocol detail merely transfers complexity and responsibility to them.
A good experience does not remove every decision. It creates the right moment and provides the right information for a user to make one. That principle carried into my later work on wallets, DeFi, and contract-management products: simplifying a complex system matters less than clearly exposing the complexity a user genuinely needs to understand.
Technologies: Ethereum, wallet systems, payments, software architecture, product strategy