Musk Poached Aave App's Web3 Prodigy

Original Title: "Teenage Prodigy Behind Aave App Joins World's Richest Man"

Original Author: Eric, Foresight News

In the early hours of March 26th Beijing time, former Base Design Lead Benji Taylor announced his move to X under Musk's helm to lead design.

Personnel changes are nothing new in the Web3 industry, but this post, with close to 15 million views, told me there was more to it.

Upon closer inspection, I realized this individual was anything but a simple Base Design Lead.

Rebellion and Talent

Benji Taylor is only around 26 years old this year, possibly a typical "post-00s" individual.

Different from the conventional path of life, Benji Taylor was already somewhat famous at 16. In 2016, this 16-year-old "creative director" from London, UK, was interviewed by the renowned British fashion culture magazine "Dazed."

At an age when many were still diligently studying in high school classrooms, Benji Taylor had already made significant waves across the Atlantic. Many artists, including Ram Riddlz and A$AP Ant, collaborated with him. Not only that, he found time to develop an app, design his own deck of cards, and establish his design firm, Next Exit.

It wasn't something he started at 16 but something he had already accomplished. According to the interview, Next Exit had been in operation for at least a year.

"To be honest, I'm not good at art; I just have a lot of ideas and decided to put them into practice."

To Benji Taylor, the cookie-cutter design aesthetic was nauseating. As someone who considered himself not good at art, he felt his work surpassed that of many others.

In that interview from 10 years ago, Benji Taylor demonstrated a maturity beyond his years, expressing not only dissatisfaction with homogeneous education but also, when asked for advice for other young creative workers, stating:

「To have more self-awareness, understand that things don't just happen out of thin air. Going to school doesn't guarantee you'll find a job, nor does it guarantee you'll have a happy and stable life. You're still young, maybe still living with your parents, not paying rent—take advantage of that. Every penny you earn is profit, so why wait for real life to wear you down?」

From Honk to Aave

Around 2020, Benji Taylor arrived in the United States. Shortly thereafter, a company named Los Feliz Engineering (LFE) was founded, named after the first community Benji lived in after coming to the U.S.

The first product launched by this company was nothing short of a grand slam.

In December 2020, Honk burst onto the scene. The app was initially promoted on TikTok, with a single video receiving over 140,000 likes.

Honk's design was unique: the app had no send button, so whatever you typed in chat would be displayed to the other person letter by letter, allowing you to see the other person editing or deleting content in real-time, akin to "live chat." Additionally, the app had no chat history; once you left the chat room, all chat content would be permanently deleted.

If you wanted to pull someone into a chat room, you could send a "Honk," which would send a prominent notification to the other person, letting them know someone was "calling" them. This novel approach of translating the in-person chatting experience into an online mechanism was quite innovative.

In 2021, Honk expanded from familiar social connections to stranger socialization, allowing users to randomly match with strangers using a feature similar to WeChat's Shake. At its peak, Honk's open rate even surpassed that of Instagram. By the time it shut down, Honk had accumulated 2.6 billion characters of input, 170 million "Honks" sent, and hundreds of millions of images, audio, and video exchanges. It gained many loyal users in fashion, tech, and other fields.

Yes, this app was taken offline a few years ago. Despite its acclaim among users and the continued nostalgia for this "honkish" style even to this day by many product people and designers, the product-market fit was truly challenged.

The primary reason was that the app required both parties to be online simultaneously. Additionally, Honk lacked group chat functionality and never released an Android version.

Perhaps this app is considered godlike in certain niche circles, but a social app seems destined to fail if it doesn't have enough users.

In 2022, the LFE team started developing the design-focused self-hosted cryptocurrency wallet Family.

If you see a wallet app that bears a resemblance to the screenshot above, it might be inspired by Benji Taylor's design. This wallet product has also received high praise in the industry, with many users referring to it as the "best user experience cryptocurrency wallet." Of course, you probably haven't heard of this wallet because they didn't do well in terms of marketing.

Perhaps feeling that a good product was never truly recognized in the market, Benji Taylor decided to seek help from a bigger platform. In 2023, LFE was acquired by Aave Labs, and at the same time, Honk was shut down, while the Family wallet continued to operate. Unfortunately, this wallet was also abandoned in February of this year, with Aave explaining that they were focusing on their DeFi business and believed that for Web3 to attract users, it needed to be purpose-built rather than a general-purpose wallet.

Having acquired Lens, Mask Network founder Suji, today on X, stated that the Family wallet is the most impressive consumer-grade wallet product in terms of design language and depth, and it forms the foundation of the Aave App.

In October 2025, Benji Taylor left Aave and joined Base as the Head of Design. If you pay attention, you will notice that the now well-known mobile apps in the Web3 industry always have Aave and Base in their names. Some industry investors have told the author that the user experience of Web3 products on mobile apps is mostly terrible. With the global number of mobile phone users far exceeding that of PC users, the poor user experience on the PC side is also one of the obstacles to Web3 user expansion.

While there are certainly issues with infrastructure and many processes that cannot be simplified due to decentralization, it is also for this reason that only designers like Benji Taylor can create mobile applications for Web3 that might just pass as acceptable in the eyes of Web2.

The Man Chosen by Musk

The fact that the extremely picky Musk personally tweeted to welcome his joining already indicates many issues.

There were many speculations about his joining X, with some believing that the product lead Nikita Bier, who previously served as an advisor to Solana Labs and the former design lead for Base, both with backgrounds in the cryptocurrency industry, suggests Musk's intention to add more cryptocurrency-related functionality to X.

Some also speculate that his experience in social apps and cryptocurrency wallets could help X's encrypted communication app, X Chat, and payment products.

In response, Benji Taylor himself provided an answer:

In the past, this talented young man has made many amazing designs, but from a purely business perspective, he seems to be too niche. After experiencing several years of ups and downs, it is believed that within this company integrating the social app X, the AI large model xAI, and SpaceX aiming directly at Mars immigration, Benji Taylor can unleash his talent to the fullest.

The AI's design capability is not weak, but the top-notch aesthetics do not come from billion-dollar or trillion-dollar parameters, but from the innate endowments of geniuses.

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