Umar Salihu

BDAN (Bitcoin Design Adoption Network) · Founder

Umar Salihu is a Product Designer, Creative Director, and the founder of Bitcoin Design Adoption Network (BDAN), an initiative focused on equipping designers across disciplines with the knowledge and mindset to think, design, and create in Bitcoin.

His work is driven by a simple belief: Bitcoin adoption is also a design problem.

While Bitcoin is often approached through the lenses of technology, economics, and finance, Umar is interested in the human side of adoption. How do people understand Bitcoin? How do they interact with it? What makes an experience feel clear, trustworthy, and useful? And how can designers help make Bitcoin accessible to people across different cultures, languages, economic realities, and levels of technical knowledge?

Through BDAN, Umar is working to grow a community of designers capable of answering these questions. The network aims to train designers across product, UX, research, visual design, branding, communication, and other disciplines to understand Bitcoin and apply their craft within the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Alongside founding BDAN, Umar is a Product Designer and Creative Director at Gada, where he works across product strategy, user experience, visual design, branding, and creative direction. His broader design practice has given him experience working on digital products and services, which he brings into his work in Bitcoin.

His Bitcoin design work includes BitTerms, an open-source Bitcoin glossary created to make Bitcoin terminology easier for non-technical people to understand. He has also explored Bitcoin product concepts around privacy, node monitoring, wallets, and Lightning UX.

A recurring theme throughout his work is Bridge Thinking, his approach to designing Bitcoin experiences for contexts that are often overlooked by mainstream technology design. Coming from Nigeria and working within an emerging-market context, Umar is particularly interested in the realities of designing for people whose financial systems, infrastructure, digital habits, languages, and lived experiences can differ significantly from those assumed by products built for more developed markets.

Umar is also active within the broader Bitcoin design community, contributing to conversations around Bitcoin UX, education, product design, and adoption.

His long-term focus is not simply to design better Bitcoin products himself, but to help build the design capacity and thinking needed for Bitcoin to reach more people.

Designing for Bitcoin. Training designers for Bitcoin. Building toward adoption.