Zer00s
A crypto vanity-address marketplace that generates blockchain addresses by their rarest trait, the leading zeros and lets you claim them, free, on any Layer 2.
Role: Owned product strategy, concept development, branding, marketplace UX, transaction flows, and launch execution. Partnered with a developer to take the product from idea to live release in one week.
Focus: Web3 / Crypto · Product & UI Design · Marketplace
Team: Design lead (my role) + 1 Designer
Timeframe: 5 Days
“ The challenge was creating a system where rarity could be understood immediately. ”
On most chains, an address is just a long string of hex no one ever reads. zer00s (a.k.a. Big Zero Bytes) turns one specific kind of address into something worth owning: the ones that open with a long run of zeros.
The more leading zeros, the rarer and the cleaner the address looks. But more importantly the more cost effective it is.
I designed zer00s end to end from the brand, the interface, and the flow that carries someone from generating a zero-heavy address to owning one.
Addresses are tokenized as ERC-721 tokens: you buy on Ethereum Mainnet and claim the same address for free on any Layer 2, ie. Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, BNB, Blast, Unichain, or Mantle.
The whole thing was a passion project, design and built in about a week with one developer and it shipped live at manyzeros.xyz.
Overview
The challenge wasn't building another crypto marketplace.
The challenge was creating perceived value around something most users ignore entirely: a wallet address.
Three things made that hard:
No inherent value signal: an address is just a hex string. Nothing about it tells a buyer it's rare or worth paying for.
It spans chains: the model is buy-on-Mainnet, claim-on-Layer-2. That has to feel like one simple action, not a multi-step crypto chore across eight networks.
Two people, 5 days: every screen had to earn its place. There was no room for anything that wasn't essential.
Underneath all of it sat the real problem: leading zeros are the entire value proposition, but they mean nothing on sight to most people.
The design had to make "more zeros = rarer" instant and obvious.
Challenge
Approach
Product Strategy
The product focused on three strategic principles:
Scarcity must be visible immediately
Cross-chain complexity must be invisible
The path from discovery to ownership must feel effortless
Every product and design decision was evaluated against these principles.
I anchored the product to three commitments:
Make the zeros the hero: The leading-zero count is the product, so it should be the most legible thing on every screen.
One clear path: generate zeros → buy → claim, with the cross-chain step reduced to a single, unintimidating action.
Ship-shaped scope: Design only what two people could genuinely finish and launch in days, nothing speculative.
What that looked like in practice:
Locked the core hook early, addresses ranked by leading-zero count (10, 12, 13, 14) and built the entire visual language around it.
Designed the catalogue and address previews so the zero-run reads at a glance against the rest of the hex.
Designed the buy-on-Mainnet / claim-free-on-L2 flow, including selection across the eight supported Layer 2s.
Built in tight loops alongside the developer and shipped to manyzeros.xyz.
The single most important decision was treating the leading zeros as the visual and emotional center of the whole product: highlight the zero-run so the thing you're paying for is the first thing you see.
Key Decisions
Designed for scarcity
The challenge wasn't building a marketplace.
The challenge was creating a system where rarity could be understood immediately.
This led us to make the leading-zero count the primary organizing principle of the entire product.
We removed blockchain complexity
The underlying technology spanned multiple chains.
Rather than exposing technical implementation details, we reduced the experience to a simple purchase-and-claim workflow.
We optimised for launch speed
With a two-person team and a one-week timeline, every feature was evaluated against a single question:
Does this increase the likelihood of a successful launch?
If not, it was removed.
Outcome
zer00s shipped as a live, working product at manyzeros.xyz a real on-chain marketplace.
The website generates around ~500 request a day
Addresses are minted as ERC-721 tokens, bought on Mainnet and claimable free across eight Layer 2s, with the smart contracts open-sourced on GitHub.
For a product built in a week by two people, the win was the thing the Challenge set out to do: it took something nobody ever looks at, a wall of hex and made a version of it that is fun to interact and use.
