Igor Pugachevsky Designer since 2011 Led design at Trust Wallet, 2022–24 Built Blum and DOGS, 2024–26
Brands, products and companies that run on agents.
Fifteen years designing products tens of millions of people use; I built two of them from zero. degenie.xyz is my lab: here I design brands, products and companies that run on agents, build them with agents under principles I write, publish what I learn, and take on one client build at a time.
- 2011Art. Lebedev StudioSenior Designer
- 2012OZON.ruHead of Design
- 2013SuperjobHead of Product
- 2015UMSTELHead of Product
- 2017WavesDirector of Product
- 2019HyperlensFounder
- 2020AGORAHead of Product Design
- 2021De.FiHead of Product & Design
- 2022Trust WalletProduct Design Lead
- 2024BlumVP of Design
- 2024DOGSHead of Product & Design
- 2026degenie.xyzThe lab: work, research, writing, practice
One lab, four outputs.
Everything on this site comes out of one place. The work: brands and products I designed and built, each shown as it ran. The research: what I build on my own to find out what holds when agents do the work. The writing: what I learned, with sources. The practice: the same methods, for your brand, product or company.
- 01 The work
Brands and products, as they ran.
Trust Wallet, Blum, DOGS, De.Fi, Waves and Hyperlens: each case with its decisions, its system and a prototype of what was built.
Six cases, and every role since 2011See the work - 02 The research
What holds when agents do the work.
DEED: agents operate capital its owner still holds, under principles the owner writes. Its factory, where agents built it. A design system that judges its own work.
DEED · its factory · its design systemSee the research - 03 The writing
What I learned, with sources.
Essays on the screen before an agent spends and on principles that run, an open library of patterns for software that acts with money, and this site’s own principles, checked on every page.
Two essays · a pattern library · twenty-two principlesSee the writing - 04 The practice
The same methods, for you.
One build at a time, with agents and a small team I name before we start: a living system, an agentic product, or a company that runs on agents and still answers to a person.
Three lines · fixed scope · Paris, worldwideSee the practice
Selected work.
Wallets, exchanges and the brands around them, from the first screen to the system behind it.
2024–2026 · Head of Product & Design
DOGS
A dog Pavel Durov drew, an identity built on it, and an airdrop for 42 million people.
2024–2026 · VP of Design
Blum
An exchange inside Telegram, Memepad, and seven products under one pixel mark. Nearly 100 million users.
2022–2024 · Product Design Lead
Trust Wallet
The 2023 relaunch of a wallet for more than 80 million people: swaps, approvals, onboarding and the next generation.
2021–2022 · Head of Product & Design
De.Fi
Everything you own in DeFi, and everything that can reach it: the whole product, its system, the iPhone app and the mark.
2017–2018 · Director of Product
Waves
A wallet, an exchange and a token launcher in one app, a year before Uniswap. Identity by ONY.
2019 · Founder
Hyperlens
A camera that sees the city as an interface, which I conceived and designed. It did not launch.
In numbers.
People who used products I designed, on one scale.
- Blum, the Telegram trading app I built from zerousers, by its infrastructure partner’s count · DigitalOcean~100M
- Trust Wallet, the year its redesign shippedusers in 2023, by the company’s count · Trust Wallet80M+
- DOGS, the app and the airdrop I designedmini app users by 10 September 2024 · Cointelegraph, citing TON53M
#1 Blum among all Telegram mini apps by monthly users, May 2025 · FindMini report. One scale, 0 to 100 million people; counts are each product’s own, at different dates.
Principles that run
Agents make the work now. I design what it is made from.
A brand book, a product spec and an org chart each become rules a machine can check. A person can read them, the system holds them, it can refuse, and every decision leaves a record.
01 The brand
A brand that holds.
Picture fifty agents making things in your brand’s name. A living system keeps every one of them on-brand: tokens, type, voice and a check that refuses what breaks them. Below, eight agents propose changes to a campaign card. Turn the principles off to see what they do without them.
Invented agents and proposals; the principles are this site’s own. Read them
degenie · campaign
Ask before you spend.
An essay on the screen a person sees before an agent moves their money.
Read the essayEssay6 min
0 applied · 0 refused
Today’s proposals
- Copy agentQueuedShorten the headline for a 390 px screenWaiting for an answer07 line length · 11 characters
········ - Promo agentQueuedAdd a second accent, violet, for the launchWaiting for an answer01 palette · one signal colour
········ - Growth agentQueuedRound every corner to 14 px so it feels friendlierWaiting for an answer08 corners · square or round
········ - Legal agentQueuedSet the disclaimer in signal at 11 pxWaiting for an answer03 signal on paper is 2.7:1 · 06 nothing under 12 px
········ - Locale agentQueuedPublish the German headlineWaiting for an answer07 line length · 24 characters
········ - Speed agentQueuedSwap Söhne for a free font to save 40 KBWaiting for an answer05 four faces, one family
········ - Social agentQueuedFill the background with signal to stop the scrollWaiting for an answer02 signal would cover 64% · the limit is 7%
········ - YouQueuedApprove square tags for data tablesWaiting for an answersigned · added to the record
········
An agent that asks before it spends.
Write spending rules in plain words, then watch a crew run a day of treasury work under them.
Try it in the essay 03 The companyA company that runs on agents and still answers to a person.
Sort a crew’s actions by consequence, and decide the ones that wait for you.
Run the crew in the essayThree ways to work together.
One build at a time, with agents and a small team I name before we start. Fixed scope, fixed fee, half at the start. Paris, working with teams worldwide, in US dollars.
Living systems
Your brand and design system as governed, agent-readable code, with a critic that refuses what breaks them.
8 to 12 weeks · from $100kWhat you get 02Agentic products
A product where agents act for people under rules they can read, from idea to a working first version.
About 8 weeks · from $80kWhat you get 03Operating systems
Your company’s agents, tools, consent gates and records, set up and run with you for thirty days.
4 to 8 weeks · from $60kWhat you getWriting
Essay · October 2026 · 7 min
Principles that run.
When agents make the work, the designer’s deliverable is the principles it is made from: the brand, the product and the company.
Read the essayEssay · October 2026 · 6 min
Ask before you spend.
AI agents can now pay. The screen a person sees before the money moves is still mostly unbuilt.
Read the essayAbout
Designer since 2011. Online I go by degenie.
I grew up in Dubna, a science town near Moscow, building model rockets and boats after school. As a teenager I launched an internet radio station and raised its first investment. Later I worked with Alexander Polyakov of PPK, releasing electronic music from Russia and the CIS in Europe and the US.
Since 2011 my work has sat at the moment a person hands power to a machine: a flight booking at Art. Lebedev Studio, a professional trading terminal, the Waves wallet and exchange, contract approvals at De.Fi, and Trust Wallet’s 2023 relaunch, whose design I led as Product Design Lead. As VP of Design I built Blum from zero, and as Head of Product & Design I built DOGS’ brand and product: Telegram products with nearly 100 million and 53 million users.
I work in small teams, close to engineering, and I build what I design. In 2026 I opened this lab, degenie.xyz: the work, the research, the writing and the practice in one place. Its current research project is DEED, where agents operate capital its owner still holds, built by agents under principles I sign. Alongside it, I take on one client build at a time.
- Based
- Paris. Working with teams worldwide, in US dollars.
- Focus
- Brands, products and the systems that run them
- Craft
- Identity and design systems, product direction, interaction design, agent systems, prototyping in code
- Languages
- English, Russian
- CV
- Read online · PDF · Word
Work with me.
Tell me what you’re trying to build: a brand that has to hold under fifty agents, a product where an agent acts for people, or a company that wants to run on agents without losing control. I reply within two working days.