Make crypto the collateral.
The lending model was built around assets users already held rather than traditional guarantees.
CASE STUDY · FINTECH / LENDING
ABAN
LOAN
Designing a crypto-backed lending product for the Iranian market.
LIVE PRODUCT · NOT A CONCEPT
Aban Loan is a real financial product I worked on at Aban Tether. As Design Lead, I worked from the early product and research phase through to the design of the lending experience and launch.
It was built around local financial requirements, banking constraints and the realities of holding crypto in Iran. The original interface is Persian; I’ve added English explanation here only where it helps tell the story.
MY ROLE · DESIGN LEAD
My responsibility was to turn the product, banking and technical requirements into a customer-facing lending experience, while working alongside Product, Engineering and the wider Aban Tether team.
Research & product definitionEnd-to-end lending experienceDesign delivery & launch
01 · WHY WE BUILT IT
Access to cash, without selling the asset.
Aban Loan was designed for people who already held cryptocurrency but needed Rial liquidity. Instead of selling their assets, eligible crypto could be used as collateral.
The product removed several requirements common in traditional lending — including guarantors, cheques and employment documents — while still operating through licensed financial partners.
02 · RESEARCH
We focused on the barriers that stopped people applying.
Research pointed to a strong appetite for crypto-backed lending, but the useful part wasn’t the headline number. It was understanding why different users struggled with traditional loan requirements.
72%of respondents expressed strong interest in a loan secured by cryptocurrency.
73%of surveyed freelancers were inclined to use crypto-backed lending when salary-slip certification was removed.
81%of surveyed workers were willing to apply when a valid guarantor was no longer required.
Keep the process online.
Documentation, status, collateral selection and repayment all needed to work as one understandable product journey.
03 · DESIGNING THE LENDING EXPERIENCE
Designing the loan flow.
The difficult work was making a financial journey understandable when the rules underneath it could change by asset, payment method or verification state.
MY RESPONSIBILITY
My role was to translate these constraints into a lending journey customers could move through and understand.
01
Choose the collateral.
Not every cryptocurrency on Aban Tether could be accepted as collateral.
If a user held an unsupported asset — for example SHIB — they first had to convert it into one of the supported collateral currencies.
02
Remove a fee, but only here.
Normally, exchanging crypto on Aban Tether involved a conversion fee.
For a conversion required specifically by Aban Loan, that fee was removed. The normal exchange product still had to keep its existing fee logic.
03
Complete verification and sign.
We couldn’t complete final identity verification and contract signing directly through the government identity infrastructure.
The journey had to move to a third-party service for that step, so the design had to make a break in the flow understandable rather than pretend it didn’t exist.
04
Repay without pretending settlement is instant.
Iranian banking limits meant some transfers could take time to settle.
While a payment was being checked, the amount could remain pending in the backend for up to 24 hours instead of returning to the user’s wallet. Status and expectation-setting mattered because the user had already moved money.
05
Release an asset whose value moved.
The collateral was crypto, not a fixed-value deposit.
By the time a loan was repaid, the market value of the collateral could be very different. The experience needed to treat collateral as a live financial asset throughout the loan lifecycle.
TRANSLATED PRODUCT VIEW
The interface was Persian. The product logic stays the same.
I translated this dashboard into English so recruiters can read the financial information without replacing the original RTL product evidence shown above.
04 · BEHIND THE UI
One product on the surface. Several systems underneath.
Aban Loan lived inside an existing crypto platform. A customer might experience one lending journey, while the product touched exchange rules, wallets, documents, banking, partner services and admin approval behind the scenes.
WHAT THE CUSTOMER SAW→ what the product had to coordinate
Loan amount + calculator
Choose collateral
Documents + verification
Receive + repay
Release collateral
→
Eligibility rules
Supported assets
Fee exception
Exchange
Wallet states
Bank transfer states
Document approval
Third-party verification
Contract signing
Repayment state
Collateral release
Admin panel
05 · BEYOND THE CUSTOMER INTERFACE
Designing for the people operating the loan mattered too.
The borrower-facing screens were only one side of the product. The scope also included document and information approval, loan status, instalments and wallet states for the teams operating the service.
I had to design with the rules of an existing financial platform in mind: sensitive identity information, approval permissions, loan states and the hand-off between customer actions and operational review. I have kept those details here only where they changed the experience.
Admin approval was part of the experience.
A customer-facing state could only be clear if the internal review state was equally clear to the team processing the application.
Loan wallet, Toman balance and bank account had to coexist.
Loan disbursement and instalment payment could move through different destinations and payment methods without becoming separate products in the user’s mind.
06 · SHIPPED
It went live.
Aban Loan launched on 15 October 2023. Aban Tether’s official 2023 report recorded 1,200 users receiving loans in the first three months.
That matters here because this is not a redesign or a concept case study. The work moved from research and product decisions into a live financial service.
INDEPENDENT PRODUCT EVIDENCE
Launch documented by Aban Tether.
The company report records the launch date, the crypto-backed lending model and the first three months of adoption.
1,200users received loans in the first three months
PRODUCT PERFORMANCE
Later internal reporting showed continued adoption after launch. I’m using the figures that can be read consistently across the report and leaving out one average-loan metric whose source values conflict.
1,520paid loans · earlier reporting period
→
10,300paid loans · later reporting period
34.89BToman · total loans paid
→
140BToman · later total reported
Source: internal Aban Loan product performance report supplied for this case study. Period labels are intentionally kept conservative because one date label in the source appears inconsistent.
LAUNCH EVENT + PRESS
The product was introduced publicly, not quietly shipped.
Aban Loan was presented at a launch press event attended by media and people from Iran’s crypto and lendtech ecosystem. The product team also spoke about the path and constraints behind the product.
EXTERNAL COVERAGE
Iranian technology media covered the public launch of Aban Loan. I use that coverage here as independent evidence that the product shipped — not as a performance claim.
LAUNCH, FROM LONDON
I had already moved to the UK by launch.
While the team was preparing the product launch in Iran, I joined them from London — including the team photo, through a laptop screen.
07 · PERSONAL NOTE
I missed
the cake.
By the time the team celebrated Aban Tether reaching one million users, I had already moved to the UK.
I wasn’t there for the celebration. I saw the photos from Iran instead.
I think that’s partly why this project has stayed with me.
Team milestone post ↗