Protocol-grade
frontends.

Basswood Creative builds interfaces users trust with real money — dApps, governance dashboards, and on-chain position management for teams whose frontends carry actual user funds.

Start a conversationSee the work ↓

TRACE, n. — THE PATH A SIGNAL TRAVELS · THE PATH A TRANSACTION TAKES.

The numbers these frontends carry.

DATA AS OF 2026-07-16 04:00 UTC

With eight years inside Sky Protocol, Basswood Creative's principal led the team that delivered Sky's flagship UI.

$18.39B
Sky ecosystem TVL, per the protocol's official analytics
SRC: OFFICIAL ANALYTICS ↗
$4.73B
Held in the Savings module, fronted by a widget built end to end
766,575
Wallets across the Sky ecosystem, connected through frontends the principal built
SRC: OFFICIAL ANALYTICS ↗

PUBLIC, SOURCED, DATED — PER THE PROTOCOL'S OFFICIAL ANALYTICS · FIGURES REFRESH AT BUILD TIME

SERVICES

Protocol to pixels, end to end.

One senior engineer across the whole surface — from the contract call to the pixel that carries it.

Build

Flagship dApp UIs, governance dashboards, design systems your frontends actually follow.

  • A fractional frontend lead

    senior ownership of your flagship UI and direct collaboration with founders, without adding full-time headcount.

  • A flagship dApp your users trust with real funds

    designed, built, and wired to your smart contracts end to end, in React and TypeScript.

  • Complex on-chain positions made legible and safe

    vault and collateral management UIs in the mold of Multi-Collateral DAI CDP tooling.

CALLS 01–03

Integrate

Smart-contract integration, LLM features that ship, data layers that stay verifiable.

  • An LLM chatbot or AI assistant live inside your product

    from the team lead who shipped the production frontend for Sky's chatbot and built the documentation pipeline that generated its training data.

  • Your protocol connected to the wider ecosystem

    smart-contract integration, including other platforms' contracts: Morpho, Curve, Pendle, and Spark are on the record.

  • An SDK/library layer for your protocol

    so integrators and internal teams can build on it without touching raw contracts.

CALLS 04–06

Advise

Agent-assisted delivery, org-level AI integration, web3 frontend best practice.

  • Web3 best practices, from someone who has lived them

    dApp and wallet UX, governance rollouts, multi-network architecture, geo/compliance handling, and the operational habits of a top protocol, drawn from eight years shipping inside one.

  • Your engineering team getting real output from coding agents

    hands-on optimization of agent integrations and workflows, drawn from an agent-assisted engineering practice on protocol software.

  • An engineer who thinks in product, not tickets

    scope, UX tradeoffs, and ship-or-cut calls weighed like an owner — eight years of turning protocol requirements into product people actually use.

CALLS 07–09
SELECTED WORK

Shipped, public, verifiable.

Every claim below links to something you can open — the live product, the repo, or both.

Sky.money — the flagship UI

The interface of the $19.8B Sky ecosystem — team-led from the ground-up redesign through today's five-network app.

● app.sky.money↗app.sky.money — Balances view of the live Sky.money application
FIG. 01 — CAPTURED 2026-07-07 · LIVE PRODUCT
ROLE · TEAM LEADNETWORKS · 5REPO · JETSTREAMGG/TARMAC ↗

Governance, reinvented

As the governance token was upgraded, so was the portal that controls the protocol — the new SKY portal and the legacy MKR portal, both live today.

● vote.sky.money↗vote.sky.money — Sky Governance Voting Portal, latest executive with 7.02B SKY supporting
FIG. 02A — SKY PORTAL (V3) · CAPTURED 2026-07-07
● vote.makerdao.com↗vote.makerdao.com — legacy Maker Governance Voting Portal, still active
FIG. 02B — LEGACY MKR PORTAL (V2) · STILL ACTIVE
~$400M VOTING POWER / POLL~1,350 POLLS258 EXECUTIVE SPELLSREPO · GOVERNANCE-PORTAL-V2 ↗

Widgets + Hooks — the open-source module kit

Self-contained UI modules for Sky protocol financial products, paired with a hooks package that speaks directly to the contracts.

SAVINGS
REWARDS
UPGRADE
TRADE
BALANCES
MODULES · 5OPEN SOURCEWIDGETS ↗HOOKS ↗

An LLM assistant, live inside the product

Team-led delivery of the production frontend for Sky's chatbot, plus the documentation pipeline that generated its training data. Shipped to non-U.S. markets.

app.sky.money · non-U.S.↗The chat assistant widget inside Sky.money: 'Hi, I'm your AI-powered chatbot assistant' with suggested questions about Sky Protocol and USDS
FIG. 03 — CHAT ASSISTANT · PRODUCT UI · 2026-07-07

Black Thursday Emergency Operations

2020-03-12 — DEPLOYED OVERNIGHTOn the day the market broke, opportunistic bots were winning liquidation auctions for near-zero bids, threatening bad debt in the system. An emergency auctions dashboard, shipped overnight, put honest keepers back in the fight.
REPO · B-PMCG/AUCTION-HELPER ↗

dai.js — the original SDK

The service-based SDK the early protocol frontends were built on — archived now, still citable. REPO · SKY-ECOSYSTEM/DAI.JS ↗

Consulting engagements

A solo practice by design.

Every engagement is delivered directly by the principal — no handoffs, no bench.

Fractional frontend lead

Your flagship UI, owned.

A centerpiece of the practice: senior ownership of your interface — architecture, product decisions, founder-level requirements intake — part-time and ongoing.

Project

Scoped, shipped, handed over.

A defined build with a defined end date — a new dApp, a governance portal, an LLM integration. Scoped together up front, delivered documented, yours to run.

Retainer

Senior judgment, on call.

Standing capacity for teams that ship continuously — features, reviews, and architecture without spinning up a new engagement each time.

The practice works remotely — as it has for eight years of protocol delivery — and serves a small number of concurrent clients, taken only where the fit is strong: web3 frontends, smart-contract integration, AI features.

About the principal

Phil Bain

Phil Bain has spent ~11 years as a professional software engineer, including eight at Sky Protocol (formerly MakerDAO, 2018–2026), rising from developer to co-founder and team lead of Jetstream — the independent studio contracted by the protocol as its primary UI development team. He works across the full stack — React, TypeScript, Next.js — and the infrastructure underneath it (Vercel, Cloudflare, AWS), and spoke at the Devconnect 2025 App Town Hall in Buenos Aires, billed alongside leaders of Uniswap, Safe, Lido, Aave, and ENS. He holds an M.A. in Emergent Digital Practices from the University of Denver.

Full resume → · More of the person at philbain.com.

Insights

Writing is on the way. Essays on protocol frontends, governance UX, and agent-assisted engineering — published here first, mirrored to Protocol Grade.

Visit Insights →

Have a frontend that carries real funds — or one that needs to?

Start a conversation