At 1:00 AM Beijing time on March 26, former Base Design Lead Benji Taylor announced that he is joining Musk's X and will lead design efforts.

Personnel changes are never big news in the Web3 industry, but this post reaching nearly 15 million reads tells me things are not that simple.

After a deeper look, I realized this person is far from just the Base Design Lead.

Rebellion and Talent

Benji Taylor is only about 26 years old, likely a standard "Gen Z".

Unlike most conventional life paths, Benji Taylor was already somewhat famous by the age of 16. In 2016, this 16-year-old "Creative Director" from London, UK, was interviewed by the renowned British fashion and culture magazine 《Dazed》.

At an age when many are still studying hard in high school classrooms, Benji Taylor was already making huge waves across the Atlantic. Numerous artists, including Ram Riddlz and A$AP Ant, had collaborated with him. Not only that, he also found time to develop apps, design his own playing cards, and start his own design company, Next Exit.

These weren't things he *started* doing at 16; they were things he had already *done*. According to the interview, Next Exit had been operating for at least a year.

"To be honest, I'm not great at art, I just have a lot of ideas and decide to put them into practice."

In Benji Taylor's view, homogeneous design styles disgusted him. As someone who considered himself not great at art, he still felt his work surpassed that of many others.

In this interview from a decade ago, Benji Taylor displayed a maturity beyond his years. Besides expressing dissatisfaction with homogenized education, when asked for advice for other young creatives, he said:

"Be more self-aware and understand that things don't just happen by themselves. School doesn't guarantee you a job, nor does it guarantee a happy and stable life. You're young, maybe still living with your parents, not paying rent—take advantage of that. Every penny you earn is profit, why wait until real life knocks you down?"

From Honk to Aave

Around 2020, Benji Taylor came to the US. Soon after, a company named Los Feliz Engineering (LFE), after the first community he lived in upon arriving, was established.

The first product launched by this company was a blockbuster.

In December 2020, Honk burst onto the scene. The app was initially promoted on TikTok, where a single video garnered over 140k likes.

Honk's design was ingenious: the app had no send button; inputted chat content was displayed to the other party character by character. You could see the person you were chatting with modifying and deleting content, like a "live chat." Additionally, the app had no chat history; once you left the chatroom, all historical content was permanently deleted.

If you wanted to pull someone into a chatroom, you could send a "Honk"; the other person would receive a prominent notification that someone was "calling" them. This method of translating the experience of offline, face-to-face chatting into an online format through mechanism design was very novel.

In 2021, Honk expanded from熟人社交 (acquaintance social) to陌生人社交 (stranger social). Users could randomly match with strangers using a function similar to WeChat's "Shake." At its peak, Honk's open rate even surpassed Instagram's. By the time it was shut down, Honk had accumulated 2.6 billion characters input, 170 million "Honks" sent, and hundreds of millions of image, audio, and video exchanges. It gained a loyal user base in fields like fashion and tech.

That's right, this app was shut down years ago. Although highly praised by its users, and even today many product managers and designers miss this "honkish" style, the product's PMF (Product-Market Fit) was genuinely challenged.

The core reason was that the app required both parties to be online simultaneously. Furthermore, Honk had no group chat and never launched an Android version.

Perhaps this app was god-like in certain niche circles, but a social app seems destined to fail without enough people.

In 2022, the LFE team began developing Family, a self-custody cryptocurrency wallet focused on design.

If you've seen wallet apps with interfaces resembling the one in the image above, they might have been inspired by Benji Taylor's design. This wallet product was also highly praised within the industry, with many users calling it the "best体验 (experience)加密钱包 (crypto wallet)." Of course, you might not have heard of this wallet because they really didn't do well in market promotion.

Perhaps frustrated that good products weren't gaining market recognition, Benji Taylor decided to leverage a platform. In 2023, LFE was acquired by Aave Labs. Concurrently, Honk was shut down, while the Family wallet continued operating. Unfortunately, this wallet was also abandoned in February this year. Aave's explanation was a focus on DeFi business, believing that attracting users to Web3 requires designing for specific purposes, not a通用型 (general-purpose) wallet.

Suji, founder of Mask Network (which acquired Lens), also said on X today that the Family wallet was the most impressive consumer-grade wallet product in terms of design language and depth, and was the foundation of the Aave App.

In October 2025, Benji Taylor left Aave and joined Base as Head of Design. If you pay attention, you'll notice that the more well-known mobile Apps in the Web3 industry today definitely include Aave and Base. An investor in the industry once told me that the mobile App experience for most Web3 products is abysmal. With far more global mobile users than PC users, the fact that only the PC experience is passable is also a hindrance to Web3's user expansion.

This is partly due to imperfect infrastructure and the complications brought by decentralization, which make many processes impossible to simplify. But precisely because of this, only designers like Benji Taylor can create mobile applications for Web3 that might be considered just及格 (passing) by Web2 standards.

The Man Chosen by Musk

The fact that the extremely picky Musk personally tweeted to welcome his加入 (joining) speaks volumes.

There is much speculation on X about his arrival. Some believe that Nikita Bier, the product lead who served as an advisor to Solana Labs, combined with the former Base design lead, their cryptocurrency industry backgrounds suggest Musk intends to add more cryptocurrency-related features to X.

Others speculate that his experience with social apps and crypto wallets could aid X's encrypted communication app X Chat and payment products.

Benji Taylor himself provided the answer:

In the past, this brilliantly talented young man created many astonishing designs, but from a purely commercial perspective, they seemed曲高和寡 (too highbrow to be popular). After several years of ups and downs, it's believed that within this company integrating social app X, AI model xAI, and Mars-aiming SpaceX, Benji Taylor can utilize his talent to the fullest.

AI's design capabilities are not weak, but the highest level of审美 (aesthetics) does not come from billions or trillions of parameters; it stems from the innate gifts of geniuses.