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The Fog Is Thickening
At Self, we use the metaphor of the fog of war to describe the digital environment we’re designing for. In games, the fog hides everything until you move closer. Online, the same is true: the less you expose, the safer you are.
But the fog is thickening. AI agents, Sybil attacks, bots, and impersonators are no longer edge cases — they’re shaping the internet in real time. And for our Product Design Lab, the challenge is clear:
How do we identify these threats early and translate them into solutions that developers and everyday users can actually trust?
Seeing Through the Fog
Designing in this environment requires more than beautiful interfaces. It requires anticipation and our process often starts with scenario mapping:
What happens when an AI agent can create a hundred wallets in a second?
What happens when a social or gaming app profile is indistinguishable from a real person?
What happens when airdrops intended for loyal communities are drained by Sybil farms?
These “what if” exercises don’t just surface risks — they give us design targets to focus on. Each imagined threat becomes an opportunity to craft a new pattern, a new principle, or a new flow that protects people without forcing them to overshare.
Airdrops and Sybil Resistance
Take airdrops. On the surface, it looks like a distribution problem. But from a design perspective, it’s a trust problem. If everyone looks like a unique user, how do we give rewards fairly? During our design process we work closely with our core engineers to design flows where a person can prove they are human, and unique, without linking a developer's software to their entire identity without their consent.
That means designing:
Lightweight proof requests that feel as natural as signing a transaction,
UX metaphors like “stamps” or “badges” that communicate legitimacy at a glance,
… and consent receipts so developers and end users alike know exactly what was shared.
The design challenge needs to solve for clarity.
The user should never wonder, “what did I just give away?”
AI Agents and Proof of Humanity
AI agents are here. They’ll deploy contracts, trade, and interact across platforms. That means every platform has to decide: who gets to act, and how do we prove the actor is human?
Our role in design is to make proof of humanity flows invisible. Instead of interrupting someone’s experience with friction, we aim to integrate proofs into the natural rhythm of interaction. This requires close collaboration with engineers: designing QR scans, deep links, and micro-interactions that feel like part of the product — not an obstacle to it.
Designing for Developers and End Users
A critical part of our work is remembering we have two users: developers and end users.
Developers need tools that are simple to integrate — SDKs, APIs, and design patterns that don’t force them to reinvent the wheel.
End users need flows that feel natural and trustworthy — proofs that happen in seconds, explained in plain language, with visible confirmation of what was shared.
A primary goal of our Design Lab is to bridge these needs. Every threat we see in the fog becomes a design question: How can we give developers superpowers while protecting end users from exposure?
This is part one of a three-part series.
Part II will look at why the old ways — KYC uploads, centralized databases, and over-collection — don’t solve these problems. In fact, they often make them worse.
Part III will share the design principles we’ve developed in partnership with our engineers — principles that let us design with the fog instead of against it.
The fog is thickening. But that’s exactly where design is most valuable: clarifying what’s real, protecting what’s private, and building products people can trust.
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