Ray Zhang Wants Crypto Infrastructure to Become Safer Without Becoming Opaque

The Ellipsis Labs engineer argues that blockchain systems need clearer risk boundaries, smoother onboarding, and financial tools users can actually understand.

Crypto does not have a trust problem because people have failed to hear enough optimistic speeches about it. Ray Zhang thinks the issue is more practical than that. Too many users have seen confusing products, speculative manias, scams, hacks, and tools that ask them to take risks they do not fully understand. The answer, he believes, has to be built into the systems themselves.

“Crypto will not earn trust because builders explain it better,” Ray says. “It will earn trust when the systems themselves become safer to use.”

Ray is a senior software engineer and backend smart contract team leader at Ellipsis Labs, where his work focuses on on-chain financial infrastructure. He is not dismissive of the skepticism around crypto. Some of it, he says, has been earned. The industry has attracted speculation, bad incentives, and products that were difficult for ordinary users to understand.

But he does not think those failures should define the entire field.

“The worst examples are real,” Ray says. “I just do not think they are the only thing the technology can become.”

That is where his work begins. Ray is interested in blockchain systems as infrastructure: programmable settlement, transparent markets, self-custody, and financial products that people can access without relying entirely on closed institutions. Those ideas sound abstract until a user has to pay a transaction fee, manage an account, understand risk, or trust that a trade will settle correctly.

The gap between promise and experience is where many crypto products lose people.

Ray sees one of the hardest design questions as a balance between simplicity and honesty. A system should remove the mechanics that make crypto harder to use than it needs to be. It should not hide the risks that matter.

“The goal is not to hide every complexity,” he says. “The goal is to remove the parts that do not help users while making the real risks easier to see.”

That principle shaped one of his contributions at Ellipsis Labs: a sponsorship service designed to improve the retail user experience. For people deeply familiar with blockchains, concepts like transaction fees and account rent may seem ordinary. For a newer user, those details can feel like a locked door before the product has even begun. Ray designed and implemented a service that reduces that kind of friction around onboarding, fees, and account setup.

The work is not only about convenience. It is about allowing people to reach the real product before the technical mechanics exhaust them.

“If someone has to understand every blockchain detail before they can begin, we have already narrowed who the system is for,” Ray says. “That is not the same as educating users. Sometimes it is just making them carry the burden of our design choices.”

His view of usability is grounded in engineering rather than presentation. Ray is not arguing that crypto needs to feel softer or more polished on the surface. He is arguing that systems should be easier to reason about. Users should be able to see what they are doing, what they are trusting, and where the risk sits. Engineers should be able to understand the system well enough to maintain it safely.

Blockchain products operate in an unusually unforgiving environment. Code is public. State is visible. Attackers can study smart contracts, integrations, user behavior, market design, and protocol assumptions. A weakness in one layer can become a problem somewhere else.

“Security is not a separate checklist at the end,” Ray says. “It has to be part of how the system is shaped from the beginning.”

Ray learned that lesson through direct infrastructure work. At Ellipsis Labs, he has designed low-level account-storage patterns that help represent complex data structures across multiple accounts on Solana. He has implemented permission and authority systems. He has optimized smart-contract compute so the system can operate within Solana runtime limits. Those choices are technical, but their purpose is practical: make systems clearer, stronger, and more reliable when users and markets put pressure on them.

He came to that work after a path that moved through early curiosity, startups, consumer systems, and eventually crypto infrastructure. Computers shaped how he learned from a young age. He was drawn to computer science, math, and physics because they gave him a way to understand complicated things from the inside. Startups later taught him that a system has to survive real use, not just make sense in theory.

Crypto added another lesson: the stakes can arrive quickly.

“In this field, an implementation detail can become user experience very fast,” Ray says. “Sometimes it can become financial risk.”

That is why he believes builders need to understand older systems as well as new ones. Crypto can move quickly, and narratives can become loud. Ray thinks better judgment comes from studying databases, operating systems, distributed systems, cryptography, and traditional market structure. Some ideas in crypto are genuinely new. Others are older ideas recombined. Still others are just renamed.

“If you only follow the narrative, it is easy to mistake momentum for substance,” he says. “The older systems teach you what problems keep coming back.”

At Ellipsis Labs, Ray’s work keeps returning to the same practical test: can a user get through the system with less confusion and a clearer sense of what they are trusting?

The point is not trading performance alone. It is whether open financial systems can become safer and more understandable without becoming closed again.

Centralized platforms often give users speed and familiarity, but users may have less visibility into how the venue operates. On-chain systems can offer transparency and self-custody, but they can also expose people to confusing workflows and unfamiliar risk. Ray’s work is aimed at narrowing that tradeoff.

“A better system should not force users to choose between understanding and access,” he says. “If we do the work right, people can have more visibility and a better experience.”

His external contributions reflect that same builder mindset. Ray has given a lightning talk at Designing DeFi, led a workshop for Solar, the Solana official Chinese community, and judged the Cypherpunk and Frontier hackathon for Colosseum. He also won the Best Decentralized Identity Project Award at ETH Shanghai 2022 for Def.network, where he contributed as a backend engineer.

Those roles place him in a wider conversation about what crypto builders should be optimizing for now. More speed is useful. More liquidity matters. More features can help. But Ray keeps returning to the same deeper requirement: the system has to deserve trust.

That does not mean making crypto feel effortless by hiding everything hard. It means knowing which complexity is unnecessary, which risk must stay visible, and which parts of the infrastructure need to fail less dramatically.

Ray Zhang’s larger goal is to help make high-quality financial markets accessible beyond closed institutions and centralized platforms. He wants systems where builders can create on shared rails and users can engage with markets that are more transparent, programmable, and understandable.

“If people only see chaos, scams, and speculation, then builders have to answer with infrastructure that behaves better,” Ray says.

That answer will not come from a slogan. It will come from code, boundaries, defaults, onboarding, risk design, and the discipline to treat usability as part of safety. For Ray, that is where crypto has a chance to become something more durable: not a louder promise, but infrastructure people can actually use with clearer rules and fewer surprises.