Building a Gamified Loyalty System / Levels
Reframed compliance as gameplay for RockWallet's crypto wallet — five-level Octalysis system where KYC reads as progress, not a gate.
Why would a timid user invest in their profile?
Most crypto wallets target degens — users who don't want an account, don't want KYC, and don't want a relationship with the issuer. RockWallet is the opposite: identity-verified, compliance-first, regulated. That positioning is the moat, but it's also a UX tax. A new user can store, send, and receive crypto without ever verifying who they are — so why would they bother? And without verification they can't buy with a card, ACH, or sell back to fiat, which is where the revenue lives.
The RockWallet 2.0 brief named the problem directly: how do we get a timid, crypto-curious user to want to invest in their profile? Not just tolerate KYC, but treat it as progress. The team had circulated a Coinbase-style "tiering system" — but those models reward whales. Our user isn't a whale. They downloaded a wallet because a friend told them to.
Tiers are for the company. Levels are for the user.
I joined as Head of Product Design and made the case that the levels system shouldn't be an afterthought bolted onto KYC — it should be the frame for onboarding, identity, and feature access. The spine that ties together SumSub verification, source-of-funds collection, fee unlocks, and every "you can't do that yet" moment in the app.
Three things had to be true at once:
- Compliance — every level had to map cleanly to a regulatory state (Level 1 = no KYC, Level 2 = full SumSub KYC + sanctions screening, Level 3+ = behavioral trust).
- Motivation — a Level 1 user with a $0 balance had to feel like progressing was for them, not for us.
- Geo-aware — we operate across jurisdictional categories (Cat 1, 2, 5), and a user in a restricted geo can't unlock Level 2 at all. The system had to gracefully say "you can't progress yet" without shaming them.
I anchored the design in Yu-Kai Chou's Octalysis framework and picked two of the eight core drives intentionally: Development & Accomplishment (the user wants to feel they're gaining competence) and Ownership & Possession (the user wants to feel that this account, this progress, is theirs).
I deliberately did not use Social Influence or Scarcity — both common in fintech gamification, both wrong for a timid user who already feels behind. Compliance also flagged streaks ("log in 3 days in a row to earn a tip") as legally grey at MVP — it can be read as encouraging investment behavior. The rejection criteria are documented in the PRD so future PMs don't reintroduce them.
The full five-level table — Level 1 through Level 5 (VIP) — is documented even though only Levels 1 and 2 ship at MVP. Shipping five tiers with only two backend-supported states would have been theatre. We chose to ship the spine and grow into it.
From there I worked backward into the surface. Profile became the home of the levels system — because Profile is the user's relationship with their account; Settings is where you change a password.
Each user state — fresh signup, mid-KYC dropoff, pending compliance review, full Level 2, geo-restricted — got its own KYC widget specification. Eight states in total. The "All Levels" page is a single scrollable view where the user can see every tier, what they unlock, what they need to do, and where they are now. Progress is communicated three ways simultaneously: a banner card at the top of Profile, a progress bar (30% → 53% → 76% → 90% pending → 100%), and a "Steps to Progress" list.
User testing validated the frame. One participant called Levels "more interesting, more challenging" and said they "saw Levels as a motivating feature." That was the unlock — the levels weren't reading as a compliance gate, they were reading as a game worth playing.
Key decisions
- Two Octalysis drives, not eight. Development & Accomplishment + Ownership & Possession. Explicitly not Social Influence, not Scarcity, not Unpredictability. Rejection criteria documented.
- No streaks at MVP. Compliance flagged "log in N days in a row" as legally grey — it can be read as encouraging investment behavior. Exploring heat-map and learning-module variants post-MVP.
- Levels = compliance state, not loyalty state, at MVP. Level 2 = SumSub-verified. Don't let marketing dilute the meaning by adding promotional levels in between.
- The Profile screen is the home, not Settings. Levels live where the user's relationship with their account lives.
- Geo-restricted users get a dignified state. Cat-2 users get a "Notify me when available" CTA, not an error. The widget for "you can't progress" looks intentional, not broken.
- Pending Review is its own state. A user who has submitted KYC and is waiting on compliance is not a Level 1 user and not a Level 2 user. 90% progress bar that doesn't advance, clear messaging.
- Five levels documented even if we ship two. Putting Level 5 (VIP) on paper — lowest fees, free trades, lower swap minimums, six wallets, airdrop eligibility — prevents the system from drifting.
- Operator Portal can remove advanced levels in fraud cases. Pushed for this early so the system doesn't paint compliance into a corner.
What's shipping with RW 2.0 MVP
States across the journey
Reflection — the in-between states matter more than the destinations
What I'd do differently: push earlier for the "Fully Realized" five-level table to live on a public marketing page, not just in a PRD. The system motivates more when users can see where they're going, even if it's months away.
I also underestimated how much energy the Pending Review state would take. It's the most emotionally fragile moment in the entire onboarding — the user has handed over their ID and is waiting on a stranger to judge them — and we ended up specifying it as carefully as Level 2 itself. The lesson: the in-between states matter more than the destinations.
The part I'm proud of: we built a compliance system that reads as a game without ever pretending KYC is fun. We didn't paper over the work; we made the work feel like progress. The MNEE Pay side of the business is now reusing the framework for merchant gamification — same Octalysis frame, different milestones (volume, refund rate, KYB completion).