Veda

Veda is a DeFi infrastructure protocol, which means its customers are companies rather than the people whose money moves through it.

It is something users never see and only feel, despite having taken more than $16 billion in deposits and having over 250,000 customers. Zagreb-based design studio Holographik was brought in to give that invisible infrastructure a face, designing the custom symbol, a system of coins representing Veda’s different vault products, the materials from which those coins are made, and the 3D and motion work that showcases them. The studio’s focus was on creating an identity that feels distinctive, scalable and instantly recognisable across Veda’s growing ecosystem.

Crypto has already settled on a well-trodden default look: a coin, usually gold and floating at a three-quarter angle, repeated across site after site. Looking like everyone else, as Holographik saw it, is the quickest way to be forgotten. Veda, however, made that even harder – there’s no product to picture, just the infrastructure other apps are built on. As a result, Holographik needed to make something that felt familiar enough for a company to trust it with real money, yet distinct enough that nobody would confuse it with the dozen coins launched that morning. Too safe and the brand would disappear into the category; too clever and it forfeits the credibility needed for a financial brand to succeed.

Before designing anything, Holographik sat with the name. Veda is Sanskrit for knowledge, which points backwards to the way ancient civilisations held on to what they valued. They made objects, such as seals, relics, inscribed tablets and coins, which are built to last and to carry meaning over centuries. An ancient coin was a record as much as it was money, a mark of who stood behind it, trusted because someone had bothered to make it permanent. Stripped of the technology, crypto is a way to store value and trust in a form that outlives the moment. “Originally, we wanted to go with something more tied to the history,” Designer Lazar Glumac tells us, the material choice following from artefacts valued long ago. “It was a bonus that they are still considered valuable metals and that they are considered as stores of value even today.”

Laying the two worlds over each other produced a coin, the visualisation that the category is already known for, treated as an artefact. Keeping it handed the studio familiarity for free. The shape is understood instantly and already stands for money. But familiarity alone does not make a brand memorable, so rather than just drawing a coin, Holographik decided to draw on one

On that surface, the studio built a language of lines. Each composition maps the infrastructure behind a specific Veda vault, such as its architecture, mechanics and the way value moves through it, so a coin is a portrait of the system sitting underneath it. Glumac puts that down to “focusing on the movement of funds, of the routes and connections between things, instead of the vault parts and destinations,” which is what stops compositions from feeling like diagrams. “Represent the nature of the vault. Reduce to simplicity. Adjust coin shape to match the abstract form. Apply one of three existing materials to get colour and texture. Introduce light,” Glumac details, listing the rules that govern how all the coins are made.

The coins come in gold, silver or copper, signalling value before anyone reads a word. Purple is a main accent colour, used mostly for CTAs and smaller details. “We built a complementary palette that worked with the purple first, but still didn’t clash with colours used for materials,” Glumac reveals. “The idea was to build a supportive, more neutral palette that would let the metal and purple stand out and take the lead.”

DeFi lives in dashboards and spreadsheets, in numbers that never quite feel like anything, so the coins were given weight, grain and the specific way light falls across brushed metal. References included real-world metals and finishes, and how Apple’s brushed aluminium feels. “That’s the way we approached building something you can almost literally hold,” Glumac details. Most of the work was made in Blender by the studio’s 3D designers, with the clean 2D schematics prepared in Figma, and “exploration for materials and light was also partially done using AI, mainly Midjourney, ChatGPT and Vizcom,” Glumac notes.

The custom symbol forms an ownable letter ‘V’ while pointing upward, reflecting Veda’s focus on optimisation and performance, and it takes on some of the coins’ attributes, material and colour among them. “The simplistic principles and geometry of the symbol ensure it remains legible even when surrounded by visually stronger elements,” Glumac notes.

Type across the system is Pangram Pangram’s contemporary sans serif Neue Montreal. “It has enough character to feel distinctive, while staying neutral enough to let the rest of the system take the lead,” Glumac continues. “Most importantly, it doesn’t lean too far into the typical technical aesthetic often associated with fintech.”