Designing better money @River
London, England
Joined November 2014
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The design team at @River has pushed over 250k lines of code in the past year.
With Ai and a solid design system behind us we're building smaller client features, adding polish, and taking control of the design system ourselves .
You'd think that means we're slowly turning into engineers. Honestly it's the opposite, we're more creative than we've ever been.
The boring parts of design get automated, so most of our time goes on design thinking.
Which is kind of the whole point of design anyway
Alex Sharp retweeted
Today we launched a new @River web app, rebuilt from the ground up.
Beyond a sleeker, easier experience, it includes a major technical overhaul:
- Faster, smoother flows across the product
- A new frontend component system that speeds up development
- A more performant, observable, and ergonomic shared API for web and mobile
- Backend upgrades for reliability, speed, and security.
Building the world鈥檚 most trusted financial institution means investing in the systems underneath.
Try it out yourself at river.com on web or mobile. We'd love your feedback!
Alex Sharp retweeted
You can now connect @River to any apps requiring transaction data via Plaid. This includes Robinhood, Rocket Money, and ChatGPT. Note this is read only. These apps cannot trade or move money on your behalf.
Alex Sharp retweeted
If the Bitcoin custody model sounds like a gender theory seminar, the less secure your Bitcoin probably is.
Alex Sharp retweeted
Digital ID for every adult is not progress. It is the end of a free society dressed up as convenience.
I am a cyber security specialist. This is my take.
They are selling it as a fix for illegal migration. That is bollocks.
We spend hundreds of billions a year on cyber security and yet the volume of breaches is breaking records. The threat is growing faster than the spend.
Digital ID will not stop boats. It will not stop trafficking gangs. It will not fix a broken border.
鈥–riminals will work around it.
Honest citizens will pay the price.
It builds giant data banks that track where you go, what you buy, what you read and who you speak to.
鈥↖t links your identity to every checkpoint in daily life.
鈥∣ne breach and your life is exposed.
Look at Jaguar Land Rover and the airports in recent weeks. Now imagine that at national scale on an ID system tied to everything you need to live your daily life.
Here is the risk that ministers will not admit.
鈥≧ansomware seeded through a supplier or an insider:
鈥↖t lies quiet for months.鈥↖t rolls through the backups.鈥∣n trigger day the register and the recovery sets are both encrypted.
鈥≒ayments fail. Health and benefits stall. Borders slow. Citizens are frozen out until a ransom is paid or the state rebuilds from scratch.
鈥–entralise identity and you centralise failure.
Do not fall for the pitch.
Function creep is certain.鈥↖t starts as login.
鈥↖t becomes access to money, travel, speech and public services.
鈥↖t turns rights into permissions controlled by the state and its contractors.
鈥↖t creates a single point of failure for criminals, insiders and hostile states to target.
鈥↖t will punish the elderly, the poor and anyone who is not always online.
鈥↖t will centralise risk and outsource blame.
鈥↖t will not stop fraud.
鈥↖t will not stop illegal migration.
鈥↖t will build the machinery for a social credit system by stealth.
If ministers cared about the border, they would enforce current laws, resource patrols and processing, close loopholes and remove those with no right to stay.
鈥╕ou do not need a national ID to do any of that.
We scrapped ID cards in 2010 for a reason.
鈥˙ritain does not need a central register to prove age or status.
鈥╕es to privacy first proofs. No to a database state.
Alex Sharp retweeted
Tracking the performance of your Bitcoin can be complex whether you are an individual investor or business owner. Today we are making it easier at @River.
You can now see summary metrics, performance history, balance history, and tax lot details in one sleek interface!
Alex Sharp retweeted
Coinbase鈥檚 obsession with trying to financialize everything onchain is not about economic freedom, it鈥檚 about turning the world into a casino so they can monetize it. Luckily this vision is fundamentally flawed and won鈥檛 happen.
Alex Sharp retweeted
Why do I call multi-asset exchanges "crypto casinos"? Because that really is their business model. The vast majority of their revenue comes from uneducated consumers trading altcoins with high fees, not from sophisticated institutional clients.
There are two paths for a crypto exchange/brokerage:
1. Bitcoin-only path - focus on helping people build and preserve long term wealth through hard money. This path leads to an exchange looking more like a "bank" long term.
2. Multi-asset trading platform - add as many coins as possible and build the business model around speculative trading. This leads to the exchange becoming more like a casino.
Both can make money, but these are the only two options. The minute an exchange adds one non-Bitcoin token they are signing up to be on the forever hamster wheel of memecoins. It makes no sense to list ETH if you don't list the tokens issued on ETH, and the same goes for Solana.
There are many successful crypto casinos, but I have no interest in building such a business. The casino business model is built around maximal extraction from customers, and the Bitcoin only model is focused on helping people build long-term wealth.
