R3D0_WEB3
Exploring Web3 in a second-hand marketplace environment
🎖️ Project awarded a LAUS prize by ADG-FAD in the digital design category in 2024
ROLE:
Product Designer
YEAR:
2024
DURATION:
6 months
INNOVATION
UX STRATEGY
WEB_3 RESEARCH
What if buying second-hand felt not only convenient — but purposeful, transparent, and fully traceable? - Redo explores that possibility.
A conceptual marketplace for second-hand materials, powered by web3 technology, designed to bring blockchain-backed provenance, environmental storytelling, and shared ownership models to the circular economy.
[01] CONTEXT
Redo was developed as the final thesis project for the Master in UX & Digital Service Design at Elisava (Barcelona). The brief required creating a digital product aligned with at least three UN Sustainable Development Goals.
We identified a clear opportunity within the creative community: artists and design students frequently generate leftover materials but lack an efficient system to recirculate them. Redo addresses this gap through a web3-enabled second-hand marketplace where blockchain certifies the provenance and lifecycle of materials — giving users both physical and digital ownership while ensuring full traceability.
Beyond the academic scope, we explored a broader question: Can web3 become a real driver of change in future supply chains — beyond speculation and hype?
[02] ROLE
Redo was a collaborative project by Hannah Adib, Yenny Rong, and myself (Javier Serón). My role leaned heavily toward product strategy, technical research, and product definition:
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Product Definition — Defined a clear value proposition, product principles, competitive advantages, and key features, using trend analysis and future-thinking to shape an innovative marketplace concept.
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Web3 Research Lead — I drove all blockchain-related research: fundamentals, architecture, and emerging use cases, establishing the technology as a solid backbone for the product.
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Business & Viability Research — Led the market analysis and model definition, structured the Business Model Canvas, and created early financial projections for a hypothetical 2-year launch scenario.
[03] CHALLENGE
We anchored Redo in a real, observed problem within Elisava: the high volume of material waste generated through prototype fabrication, combined with the absence of systems to recirculate these materials.
From there, we expanded the challenge: How might we integrate web3 technologies into everyday digital products without overwhelming users? What friction does web3 introduce? Where does it add real value?
MAIN CHALLENGES:
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Innovation vs. Adoption — Pushing technological innovation without compromising usability or accessibility.
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Sustainable Digital Product — Designing a solution that meets at least three UN SDGs while remaining viable and user-centric.
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Everyday Disruption — Exploring how emerging technologies could improve existing behaviors in simple, non-intimidating ways.
[04] GOALS
Translated into concrete product goals:
MAIN GOALS:
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Encourage recycling → Enable users to buy and sell leftover materials, reducing waste and promoting circular practices.
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Promote sustainable creativity → Support artists and designers in adopting recycled materials through a more transparent ecosystem.
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Enhance traceability → Provide blockchain-verified provenance to build trust in material quality and origin.
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Reduce waste → Give unused materials a second life, preventing them from ending up in landfills.
↳ These goals guided every decision across research, product strategy, and design.
[05] PRODUCT DESIGN
Every design decision began with validation. Before shaping a solution, we focused on understanding real needs and behaviors within the university ecosystem.
USERS INSIGHTS
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Excess material is a universal pattern → 90% of students generate leftover materials after projects.
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Strong intent to recirculate, but no channel → 90% are willing to sell or exchange materials, but lack tools to do so.
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Sustainability is valued, but convenience wins → 80% appreciate sustainable practices, yet prioritize price and ease of purchase.
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Structural problem, not just individual → The workshop manager confirmed the absence of any system capable of managing the university’s material waste at scale.
TRENDS SEEKING
Future-facing trend analysis was a core pillar of the project. Redo’s product strategy and feature definition were heavily shaped by understanding where digital behavior, ownership models and sustainability practices are heading. The goal was to design with a disruptive, near-future lens — without crossing into speculative design.
Key trends that informed the product:
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Collaborative Economy — People increasingly value belonging and participation over transactional relationships.
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Digital Currencies — The rise of crypto and alternative payment systems reshapes expectations around digital value.
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New Business Models — Users gravitate toward participatory, community-driven ecosystems that foster engagement.
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Zero-Waste Mindset — Growing environmental awareness drives demand for reuse-first solutions.
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Blockchain & Decentralization — As Web2 models lose trust, users seek transparency, ownership, and autonomy.
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Radical Transparency — Consumers expect clarity in supply chains, product origins, and digital interactions.
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Second-Life Consumption — Economic pressure and environmental responsibility accelerate the adoption of reuse and recycling as everyday behaviors.
This trend landscape allowed us to position Redo in a relevant, emerging space where circularity, transparency, and digital ownership intersect.
VALUE PROPOSITION
Built using the Value Proposition Canvas to synthesize user segments, pains, gains, and functional needs.
A marketplace for recycled materials that helps the art and design community reduce waste and verify sustainable provenance.
PRODUCT_PRINCIPLES
To maintain coherence during the design process, we defined four foundational principles:
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Make technology invisible — Web3 should operate in the background, not become a barrier to adoption.
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Guarantee transparency — Provenance and lifecycle data must be accessible, verifiable, and trustworthy.
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Secure origin — Certification is core: users should know exactly where materials come from.
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Users own the asset — Users hold both the physical material and its digital representation (NFT), reinforcing trust and long-term value.
These principles served as our north star — ensuring alignment between technology, user needs, and product purpose.
FINAL HYPOTHESES
A core part of Redo’s product strategy was built around a set of foundational hypotheses — questions that shaped how we could deliver a truly disruptive, trust-driven marketplace experience:
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How do we guarantee transparency across asset exchanges within the platform?
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How do we ensure end-to-end traceability of every material?
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How do we certify the authenticity and sustainable provenance of each asset?
In other words:
What underlying technology can operationalize transparency, traceability, and authenticity as first-class product features? Positioning Redo as a web3-native product and leveraging blockchain as its trust infrastructure.
↳ The technical resolution of these hypotheses — including why blockchain and how web3 enables transparency, traceability, and ownership — is detailed in the Solution section.
[06] SOLUTION
In digital product design, the “solution” often gets reduced to a set of polished screens — a mobile app, a website, a flow. But Redo was different for me. This project allowed me to step outside the traditional boundaries of UX and focus on something far more fundamental: the technological architecture that makes the product viable.
Yes, I designed interfaces. But my core contribution — and where I played a leading role — was in defining the system that powers Redo under the hood: a decentralized trust layer built on web3.
Rather than treating blockchain as a feature, we treated it as the backbone of the product, enabling ownership, transparency, and material traceability in ways that conventional Web2 systems simply cannot.
This section focuses on that solution: how we transformed abstract hypotheses around trust and provenance into a scalable, verifiable, blockchain-powered product foundation.
WHY BLOCKCHAIN?
Blockchain provides a structural advantage for a marketplace built around circularity and verified provenance. By design, it enables:
1. Immutable Ownership Registry → Transforms users from consumers into true asset owners.
Each transaction is recorded on-chain, creating a tamper-proof ledger where every user maintains a verifiable, persistent proof of ownership — both physical and digital (via NFTs).
2. Transparent Exchange Mechanisms → Transparency becomes a feature, not a burden.
Blockchain acts as a shared audit layer, making all transfers trackable, trustless, and verifiable without requiring users to understand the underlying complexity.
Full Lifecycle Traceability → Proven linear & accountable trail
Every material listed on Redo receives an on-chain identity, allowing us to map its entire journey across owners, uses, and reuses.
4. Authenticity & Provenance Certification → Certification becomes native to the product experience
Users can trust that materials are recycled, reused, and sustainably sourced because the chain of custody is publicly verifiable.