Bryan Shi

Bryan's practice is institutional DeFi UX and blockchain infrastructure: product design for regulated financial operators, the compliance, treasury, operations, and finance teams working across both blockchain and fiat rails, since institutions can only put crypto to work when it connects to traditional finance. Since 2020 he has designed across essentially the whole enterprise-blockchain stack at Ripple: cross-border payments, crypto liquidity and OTC trading, on- and off-ramps, custody and wallets, the RLUSD stablecoin and its issuer platform, tokenization, and the design system underneath all of it. Few designers have worked across that entire stack; fewer have then been asked to converge it.

Bryan is a Staff-plus individual contributor who leads through systems rather than headcount: he has no direct reports and works by owning the architecture (object models, information architecture, design infrastructure) in partnership with product and engineering leads. He transformed Ripple's payments platform from an API testing tool into a product-grade solution, driving a 40% increase in UI adoption within a year, and established the first product-metrics dashboard adopted by four cross-functional teams. As the sole designer on crypto liquidity he incubated the OTC trading solution, which surpassed twice its projected trading volume after launch. He overhauled the custody platform from an API simulator into a permission-based institutional workflow system, doubling transaction volume, and redesigned its core DeFi capabilities: smart contracts, staking, tokenization, and dApps. He pioneered rapid prototyping across the stablecoin lifecycle, which surfaced the operational challenges that shifted strategy toward launching Ripple's branded stablecoin, RLUSD, which ranked in the top five within its first year. He founded the Ripple Design System, shipping ten-plus core components in its first year and a system-design process now used by twenty-plus designers and two hundred engineers across five products. In 2026 he was appointed to lead One Ripple: the UX architecture and shared object model that bring Ripple's homegrown and acquired products into one experience.

Systems- and architecture-led. He starts by finding the real operating model underneath the interface (who does what, with which permissions, in what sequence) and makes the system render it. Compliance and security are design material, not constraints applied afterward. Decisions are validated with real behavior: prototypes built as decision instruments, metrics dashboards built before the feature they measure. Recurring signatures across his work: the Environment → Entity → Entitlement → Role context spine that resolves what an operator sees; object- and intent-centric information architecture instead of feature menus; the "one shell, many roles" navigation model; and designing for scale through mergers and acquisitions, where acquired products have to be absorbed into one system without a rebuild.

Bryan builds for AI rather than only using it. He re-architected the Ripple Design System as an AI substrate: an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that lets coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot query the design system directly and compose real production components from a plain-language prompt. The result is generative UI from the codebase itself, with a telemetry loop feeding usage back into the system. For regulated finance he designed an agentic-UX layer on the principle that an agent is a co-pilot, not an autopilot: autonomy scales with consequence, and irreversible actions stay human-approved. He is a designer who builds, prototyping in code and shipping front-end, and holds a Machine Learning certification (Stanford University via Coursera) alongside a Blockchain Business Model certification (Duke University via Coursera).

• Context-Aware Payments: re-architecting an institutional payments product around how the organization actually operates, front, middle, and back office, rather than around the product's technical lifecycle.
• Smart Contract Operations: turning raw blockchain mechanics into business intent, with a design decision that changed the custody platform's data model.
• Stablecoin Operating Model: prototyping used as due diligence, a full stablecoin operating model simulated end to end to make a go-to-market decision.
• Design System Engine: a design system built to absorb acquisitions and to serve AI agents through an MCP server, not just designers.
• One Ripple Platform: platform convergence through a unified object model, a context-aware shell, and an agentic layer.
• Realtor Command Center: the pre-Ripple proof that the same systems instinct produces business outcomes, a mobile-first rebuild that tripled deal volume on flat headcount and contributed to UpNest's acquisition by Realtor.com.

From 2016 to 2019 Bryan was Product Designer & UX Engineer at UpNest in Burlingame, California, a real-estate marketplace later acquired by Realtor.com. He designed and shipped the realtor CRM across web, iOS, and Android, rebuilt the internal deal-management platform so operations could support triple the deal volume without added hours, and built a modular marketing web system that doubled conversion within a year. Before product design he trained and practiced as a building architect at Goettsch Partners in Chicago (2013–2015), working on high-rise projects, including a completed 403-metre tower and a boutique hotel, and running a 3D-printing model shop that contributed to more than a hundred winning bids. Before that he worked as a 3D artist in New York (2012–2013) producing immersive digital experiences for clients including Lacoste, MoMA, and General Electric. He holds a Master of Science from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The pre-product work is archived on the Lab page.

Architecture taught him that structure precedes decoration; 3D and motion taught him that a story needs high fidelity to land; product design at UpNest taught him to measure. The crypto years put all three to work on systems where the cost of a wrong click is real money. Bryan describes the pattern as system thinking: find the underlying model, make it legible, then make it operable.

Email contact@bryanshi.com · LinkedIn · Résumé (PDF)