RYO Coin is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that prioritizes user anonymity and secure transactions. In early 2025, I was contacted by the RYO Coin team to remake their website. The old version can be found in the Web Archive.

Workflow

The project workflow was a disaster. The RYO Coin team had no clear requirements, no designer, and no project manager. I had to take on all these roles myself. The team consisting of several people from different countries and timezones had problems communicating and making decisions. The task for me was to create a responsive frontend website using one screenshot generated by Dalle in ChatGPT. Additionally, I had been tasked with editing it to cut out visual assets for the website.

I had been forced to work with a third-party time tracking software installed on my personal machine and rely on macOS security to protect my privacy. The choice of software was made by the RYO Coin team leader with an option to use the Upwork program instead if I pay 15% of its fee.

Payment Issues

After a week of work, the project manager by the name of Fireice-uk stated that he is not OK with paying me the full amount and will only pay half of it. Additionally, this "decision had to be repeated once again in the future" lowering my pay to 25% of the original amount.

On top of that the general communication from Fireice was unprofessional and highly unethical, for instance I had to "for the love of god, please punch out if I gotta take a fap break". I have been warned twice about this. This was the first communication I had with him without any prior context to this statement, practically after we just greeted. This left me wondering if Fireice introduces all his employees to this specific rule. I was also not allowed to make any breaks or be distracted under the threat of instantly being "fired without pay". The software we used also tracked my "activity" based on number of clicks and mouse movements I make every 2 minutes.

The overall communication with Fireice was composed of me talking about work and him sexualizing women, sending me unfunny memes made with AI and trying to teach me basics of programming, such as how to use git. This was after I sent him my 4-year-old GitHub profile with 150 projects. Sometimes he would send me drunk messages and tell me about cryptocurrency market. He once sent me a meme featuring Borat. Not that I mind Borat memes, but at this point I assumed he would get that I prefer professional talk about work.

Every time I sent my time-entries sheet he took about 3 days to analyze it, find how much time he wants to substract and tell me once again that I must "punch out" if I went to drink some water or visit bathroom even for two minutes. Keep in mind that this was on about half of my normal hourly rate.

Design

The team had been trying to settle on a design for several weeks, sending a new one every time and asking me to make a new website. It started with a cosmic theme, then ocean theme, then rainforest theme, then finally something in between all of that combined together. At v4 it started to look less like a serious project and more like a 10 years old child mashing cool PNG pictures in MS Paint. A designer they hired had no experience working with Figma at all and was trying to draw assets from GPT-generated screenshots by hand, then just cutting them out and collaging together. I had to make my own Figma file with responsive containers and correct layouts.

Luckily, I was able to convince the team to not design API reference pages and was able to ship a pretty decent, responsive and nice documentation with code examples, snappy navigation and color palette inspired by OpenAI website.

Reception

The v4 version of the website had been launched at ryo-currency.com in mid-2025. After receiving my final payment, the team expressed their wish to continue working with me for a lower pay rate to which I politely declined. I have not been contacted by them since.