Elon's Appointment: How Would a Crypto Background Person Design the Super Payment Gateway

By Zen, PANews

For Musk, the long-standing vision of turning X into a “super app” is now entering a critical phase where rollout is accelerating. Right at this moment, X’s design team has undergone an important personnel change—Benji Taylor has joined the team and is responsible for overall design work.

This key personnel adjustment quickly pushed Taylor into the spotlight. After an official announcement of his leadership over X’s design work, he signaled his stance with the line, “Top priority: improve everything,” and that post also garnered hundreds of millions of views in a short time, becoming an important entry point for outsiders to observe this appointment.

Taylor has long been active in the cryptocurrency industry, and he is not the kind of figure who builds notoriety by making frequent public statements. Based on the career path visible in public, he is a pure product designer who has consistently focused on repackaging complex capabilities that originally belonged only to a small number of advanced users into products that a wider range of users can understand and are willing to use.

A Methodology for Crypto Products: Breaking Usage Barriers

In the past, Benji Taylor wasn’t a person with very frequent exposure, but in the product and design circles, his trajectory was quite clear. According to the introduction on his personal page, he has long focused on the intersection between consumer software, social products, and on-chain products, which has also formed the main line behind nearly all his subsequent career choices.

Taylor first founded the consumer software company Los Feliz Engineering (LFE). The company produced the real-time communications app Honk, and later, the self-custody wallet Family—better known in the crypto industry. LFE was acquired by Aave Labs in September 2023. Taylor then served as CPO at Aave until October 2025. After that, he became Head of Design for Base, which is under Coinbase. Today, he leads X’s design team.

If Honk represents Taylor’s early understanding of consumer communication products, then Family is the stage where he truly established industry recognition and a product methodology.

In November 2024, when Family officially launched the product, its official blog defined it as a “secure, beautifully designed, feature-rich” non-custodial wallet, emphasizing that it is not only for advanced users, but also for a broader audience “from new users to experienced ones.” Users can create wallets using email or a phone number together with a passkey or a password, instead of facing the high-bar entry points that are common with traditional crypto wallets.

Half a year later, Family released “Making Family Simpler & Safer.” In this official introduction, Family was very clear about its new direction: making wallet creation, security, and recovery simpler and safer. Users can complete onboarding via email or SMS without directly interacting with mnemonic-entry style touchpoints, while also leveraging passkeys, encryption, and multiple recovery options to balance security and control.

At the time, Benji Taylor publicly stated that crypto product onboarding has long been “confusing and full of friction.” Family’s goal, he said, is to remove the technical obstacles that prevent users from getting started, while keeping users in control of their assets. For many non-crypto users, this design isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s the prerequisite for whether they will complete their first step.

From a product perspective, Family’s most important aspect is not just that it “made a wallet,” but that it attempted to turn the wallet from a technical tool into an entry experience more like everyday software. That’s also why, when Avara looked back at this acquisition in February 2026, it specifically emphasized that the Family team later contributed not only to the wallet itself, but also to Aave App, Aave Pro, developer documentation, and a broader design system.

For X Money: Absorbing Product Complexity

After understanding what Benji Taylor has done over the past few years, and then looking back at X’s current stage, you’ll find that this appointment is actually quite targeted. X isn’t lacking the ability to tell stories; what it lacks is the ability to genuinely embed payments into the main social platform product.

Around the same time Benji Taylor joined X, X’s payments business, X Money, had also entered a clearer window for real-world rollout. According to reports from multiple media outlets, Musk said that X Money would enter early public access this month. Earlier than that, X had already partnered with Visa: X Money accounts would support users adding funds to their X Wallet, linking a debit card for point-to-point payments, and transferring funds back to a bank account.

So what X needs isn’t a person who only handles visual style, but someone who understands how “accounts, permissions, security, and money flows” can be expressed in the interface. What Taylor did on Family—precisely—was to lower entry friction and account-management friction, and to find a balance between security and usability.

If you break down the abilities X is looking for in Benji Taylor even further, they can roughly be summarized into three layers.

First, the ability to make new users dare to start using it. A point Family repeatedly emphasized is that a user’s first time shouldn’t feel like a technical exam. Email, phone numbers, passkeys—these may look like mere design details, but in practice they are lowering the barrier for first use. For X Money, this is equally critical. Payment features aren’t prepared for a small group of technical users; they need to face ordinary users on a social platform.

Second, the ability to bridge security and ease of use. Family’s official introductions have repeatedly mentioned self-custody, encryption, passkeys, multiple recovery options, and a clearer process design around security actions. If X wants to make payments a high-frequency capability, it can’t only emphasize speed and convenience—it also has to make users feel that the system is worth trusting. Taylor’s experience sits right at the intersection between control and convenience.

Third, the ability to turn capabilities into platform-level infrastructure. The Family Accounts designed by Taylor, as embedded wallet infrastructure, have been used more broadly across Aave App, Aave Pro, and other products. This shows that Taylor’s value isn’t limited to building a single beautiful standalone application, but lies in turning account and wallet capabilities into underlying modules that can be reused across an entire product matrix. For X, this is especially important: if X Money is to evolve from a single payments attempt into infrastructure that runs through creators’ income, user transfers, subscriptions, and even broader financial entry points, it needs capabilities like these.

What is most noteworthy about Benji Taylor isn’t how many popular companies or tracks appear in his resume, but that these experiences have always revolved around a question that’s rarely discussed loudly—whether complex systems can be used naturally by ordinary people.

Honk is one answer, Family is a clearer one, and Avara’s absorption of Family indicates that this set of answers is reproducible. Now, this question has been brought to X. For Musk, a “super app” is—strategically for users—above all, it must be an experience.

On the eve of payment rollout, X’s choice of Benji Taylor may precisely be because when a platform is preparing to integrate accounts, wallets, payments, and social relationships into a single whole, what’s truly critical is often not the person who can talk about vision the best, but the person who can most effectively digest complexity.