Benji Taylor, Former Base Design Lead, Joins X to Lead Design

Original author: Eric, Foresight News

At 3:00 AM Beijing time on March 26, former Base design lead Benji Taylor announced he has joined Elon Musk’s X and will lead its design efforts.

Personnel changes are never a big deal in the Web3 industry, but the fact that this post has nearly 15 million views tells me things are not that simple.

After further investigation, I realized that this person is far more than just Base’s design lead.

Benji Taylor is only about 26 years old and may be a typical 'post-2000s' individual.

Unlike most conventional life paths, Benji Taylor was already well-known at the age of 16. In 2016, this 16-year-old "creative director" from London, UK, was featured in an interview with the renowned British fashion and culture magazine Dazed.

At an age when many were still scribbling away in high school classrooms, Benji Taylor was already making waves across the Atlantic. He has collaborated with numerous artists, including Ram Riddlz and A$AP Ant. Beyond that, he also found time to develop apps, design his own playing cards, and launch his own design company, Next Exit.

This is not something he started doing at age 16, but something he has already completed. According to the interview, Next Exit has been operating for at least one year.

To be honest, I'm not particularly skilled in art—I just have a lot of ideas and decided to put them into practice.

To Benji Taylor, uniform design styles are repulsive; as someone who considers himself unskilled in art, he still feels his work surpasses that of many others.

In this 10-year-old interview, Benji Taylor demonstrated maturity beyond his years, and when asked for advice to other young creative professionals, he said:

Be more self-aware—understand that things don’t happen by chance. Going to school doesn’t guarantee you a job or a happy, stable life. You’re young, perhaps still living with your parents and not paying rent—make the most of this advantage. Every dollar you earn is profit. Why wait until reality knocks you down?

Around 2020, Benji Taylor came to the United States. Shortly after, a company named Los Feliz Engineering (LFE), after the first community where he settled in the U.S., was established.

The company's first product was a smash hit.

In December 2020, Honk launched. The app was initially promoted on TikTok, with a single video garnering over 140,000 likes.

Honk is designed uniquely: the app has no send button—what you type in a chat is displayed character by character to the other person, allowing you to see them edit or delete messages in real time, much like a live chat. Additionally, the app has no chat history; once you leave a chat room, all previous messages are permanently deleted.

If you want to invite someone into the chat room, send a "Honk"—they’ll receive a prominent notification letting them know someone is calling for them. This innovative mechanism brings the experience of in-person conversations online.

In 2021, Honk expanded from social connections among acquaintances to stranger social networking, allowing users to randomly match with strangers through a feature similar to WeChat's “Shake.” At its peak, Honk’s open rate even surpassed Instagram. By the time it was discontinued, Honk had accumulated 2.6 billion characters of input, 170 million “Honk” sends, and hundreds of millions of exchanged images, audio, and video files, earning a loyal user base in fashion, technology, and other fields.

Yes, this app was discontinued several years ago. Although it was highly praised by users and is still fondly remembered by many product professionals and designers for its “honkish” aesthetic, the product’s market fit was genuinely challenged.

The most fundamental reason is that this app requires both parties to be online simultaneously. Additionally, Honk has no group chat functionality and never launched an Android version.

Perhaps this app is revered as divine in certain niche circles, but a social app without enough users seems destined to fail.

In 2022, the LFE team set out to develop Family, a self-custody cryptocurrency wallet focused on design.

If the wallet app you see bears resemblance to the screen shown above, it may have been inspired by Benji Taylor’s design. This wallet product is highly regarded in the industry, with many users calling it the “best experience crypto wallet.” Of course, you’ve likely never heard of it, as they’ve done a poor job with marketing.

Perhaps because its perceived superior product never gained market acceptance, Benji Taylor decided to leverage the platform. In 2023, LFE was acquired by Aave Labs, Honk was shut down, and the Family wallet continued operating. Unfortunately, this wallet was also discontinued in February of this year, with Aave explaining that it was focusing on its DeFi business and believing that Web3 needs to attract users through purpose-driven design rather than generic wallets.

Today, Suji, founder of Mask Network, which acquired Lens, also said on X that the Family wallet is the most impressive consumer-grade wallet product in terms of design language and depth, and serves as the foundation for the Aave app.

In October 2025, Benji Taylor left Aave to join Base as Head of Design. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that among today’s most well-known mobile apps in the Web3 space, both Aave and Base are prominently featured. A prominent industry investor once told me that the mobile app experience for most Web3 products is abysmal. With global smartphone users vastly outnumbering PC users, the fact that only the PC experience is reasonably polished remains one of the key barriers to user adoption in Web3.

Certainly, there are issues with underdeveloped infrastructure and the many processes that cannot be streamlined due to decentralization—but precisely because of this, only a designer like Benji Taylor could create a mobile app for Web3 that might just meet the baseline standards of Web2.

The fact that even the highly discerning Musk personally tweeted to welcome him speaks volumes.

There has been much speculation on X about his joining, with some believing that Nikita Bier, a product lead who previously served as an advisor at Solana Labs and headed design at Base, along with his background in the cryptocurrency industry, indicates Musk’s intent to add more cryptocurrency-related features to X.

Others speculate that his experience with social apps and cryptocurrency wallets could benefit X's encrypted messaging app, X Chat, and its payment products.

Benji Taylor himself provided the answer:

In the past, this talented young man created many brilliant designs, but they were arguably too avant-garde from a purely commercial standpoint. After years of ups and downs, Benji Taylor is now poised to fully realize his potential at the company that brings together the social app X, the AI large model xAI, and the Mars-colonization-focused SpaceX.

AI's design capabilities are not weak, but the highest level of aesthetics does not come from hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters—it stems from the innate talent of geniuses.