Original Title: "The Young Genius Who Laid the Foundation for Aave App Was Recruited by the World's Richest Man"
Original Author: Eric, Foresight News
In the early hours of March 26, Beijing time, former Base design lead Benji Taylor announced that he joined Musk's X and will lead the design work.
Personnel changes in the Web3 industry are never big news, but this post, which has nearly 15 million views, tells me that things are not simple.
After digging deeper, I realized that this person is far more than just the design lead of Base.
Rebellion and Talent
Benji Taylor is only about 26 years old, possibly a standard "post-2000" generation.
Unlike most people's routine lives, Benji Taylor was already somewhat famous at the age of 16. In 2016, at the age of 16, this "Creative Director" from London, England, was interviewed by the well-known British fashion and culture magazine "Dazed".
While many were still scribbling away in high school classrooms, Benji Taylor had already made waves across the Atlantic. Many artists, including Ram Riddlz and A$AP Ant, had collaborated with him. Moreover, he found time to develop applications, design his own playing cards, and found his own design company, Next Exit.
This is not something he started doing at age 16; rather, it is something he had already accomplished. According to the interview, Next Exit had been operational for at least a year.
"To be honest, I'm not good at art; I just have a lot of ideas and decide to put them into practice."
In Benji Taylor's view, the monotonous design styles made him feel nauseous; as someone who considers himself not good at art, he believes his work surpasses that of many others.
In this interview from ten years ago, Benji Taylor exhibited a maturity beyond his years. Besides expressing dissatisfaction with homogenized education, he also stated when asked about advice for other young creative workers:
"Be more self-aware and understand that things do not happen out of thin air. Going to school does not guarantee you a job, nor does it guarantee a happy and stable life. You are still young and may still live with your parents without having to pay rent; make good use of that. Every penny you earn is profit. Why wait for reality to crush you?"
From Honk to Aave
Around 2020, Benji Taylor came to the United States. Shortly thereafter, the company Los Feliz Engineering (LFE), named after the community where he lived in the U.S., was founded.
The first product launched by this company was nothing short of explosive.
In December 2020, Honk burst onto the scene. The app was initially promoted on TikTok, with individual videos receiving over 140,000 likes.
Honk's design is unique: the app lacks a send button; instead, the input content will be displayed to the other party word by word in real-time, allowing users to see the adjustments and deletions made by their chat partner, akin to "live chatting." Additionally, the app has no chat history—once you leave the chat room, all historical chat content is permanently deleted.
If you want to pull someone into the chat room, you can send a "Honk," and the other party will receive a noticeable notification, indicating that someone is "calling them." This innovative mechanism of translating the offline chatting experience to online is very fresh.
In 2021, Honk expanded from socializing with acquaintances to strangers, allowing users to randomly match with strangers through a feature similar to WeChat's shake-to-find. At its height, Honk's open rate even surpassed that of Instagram. Upon being discontinued, Honk accumulated 2.6 billion characters input, 170 million "Honks" sent, and hundreds of millions of images, audio, and video exchanges, gaining numerous loyal users in the fashion and technology fields.
Indeed, this app was discontinued a few years ago. Although it was highly praised by users, and many product and design individuals still reminisce about the "honkish" style even today, the product's PMF (Product-Market Fit) faced real challenges.
The core reason is that the app requires both parties to be online simultaneously. Furthermore, Honk did not feature group chats and never released an Android version.
Perhaps this app was iconic in certain niche circles, but a social app without a sufficient user base seems doomed to fail.
In 2022, the LFE team began developing Family, a self-hosted cryptocurrency wallet focused on design.
If you've seen a wallet application that resembles the page in the above image, it may have been inspired by Benji Taylor's design. This wallet product has also received widespread acclaim in the industry, with many users calling it "the best user experience crypto wallet." Of course, you might not have heard of this wallet because they did not do well in market promotion.
Perhaps feeling that a good product has never been recognized in the market, Benji Taylor decided to leverage a platform. In 2023, LFE was acquired by Aave Labs, while Honk was discontinued, and the Family wallet continued its operation. Unfortunately, this wallet was also abandoned in February of this year, and Aave stated that they wanted to focus on DeFi business, believing that Web3 needs to design according to purpose to attract users, rather than being a general-purpose wallet.
The founder of Mask Network, who acquired Lens, also stated today on X that Family wallet is the most admirable consumer wallet product in terms of design language and depth, and is the foundation of Aave App.
In October 2025, Benji Taylor left Aave and joined Base as the design head. If you pay attention, you'll notice that now well-known mobile apps in the Web3 industry definitely bear the names of Aave and Base. An investor in the industry once told me that the mobile app experience of Web3 products is mostly horrendous; today's global number of mobile users far exceeds that of PCs, but having a reasonable PC experience also remains a barrier to Web3's user expansion.
This is certainly due to incomplete infrastructure and many processes brought about by decentralization that cannot be simplified, but for that very reason, only designers like Benji Taylor can create mobile applications for Web3 that might barely pass for sufficient in Web2.
The Man Chosen by Musk
The fact that the extremely picky Musk personally tweeted to welcome his joining speaks volumes.
There have been many speculations about his joining X; some believe that Nikita Bier, a product lead who served as a consultant for Solana Labs, combined with the former design lead of Base, indicates that Musk intends to add more cryptocurrency-related features to X.
Others speculate that his experience in social applications and cryptocurrency wallets could assist X's encrypted communication product X Chat and payment products.
To this, Benji Taylor himself provided an answer:
In the past, this talented young man created many jaw-dropping designs, but from a purely commercial perspective, they seemed high-end yet not widely embraced. After experiencing several years of ups and downs, I believe that in a company that integrates the social application X, AI model xAI, and Martian colonization-driven SpaceX, Benji Taylor can unleash his talent to the fullest.
The design capabilities of AI are not weak, but the top aesthetics do not come from billions or trillions of parameters; they stem from the inherent gifts of geniuses.
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