Pricing a place in line
The Pod Market was a paginated table of listings, and comparing two meant doing the maths yourself. I made where a listing sits the comparison.
Role
Founding product designer
Team
Head of product, co-founders, 3 engineers
Timeline
Pinto Money, 2025
43M
Pods in the line the chart had to make readable
~2,000
wallets on the protocol
1 library
covering every transaction state
The data
Two numbers that pull against each other
Every listing is a promise to be paid back later. Its value depends on two things at once: the price per Pod, and where it sits in a line of roughly 43 million Pods that get paid back first in, first out. Cheap Pods are usually far back in line. A good buy is a tradeoff, and the old table made you work it out row by row.
Price per Pod
What you pay today. The number everyone sorts by first, and the one that misleads you most on its own.
Place in line
How many Pods get paid before yours. It decides when you get your money back, and it moves every Season as the line is paid down.
Pod Score
Colors every dot from low to high, so strong listings stand out before you read a single number.
Effective Temperature
What you would earn by buying here, shown beside the price you set so the tradeoff stays in view.
Technical challenges
What made this hard to plot
Putting listings on a chart sounds simple. The data didn't cooperate. Each of these shaped what the market view could honestly show.
Listings bunch up at the front
Most listings sit in the first few million Pods of the line, so the busiest part of the market is also the most crowded part of the chart.
Design response
Small square markers instead of big dots, a crosshair that isolates the listing you’re on, and price and place sliders that cap the view to what you’d actually buy.
A 43 million Pod axis
Place in line runs from zero to over 42 million. The tempting fix is a log scale, but that would lie about how far apart two places really are, and distance here means time until you get paid.
Design response
The axis stays linear, and every strip on the page (available listings, My Pods in Line) uses the same 0 to 42M scale, so a position means the same thing everywhere.
The data moves under you
The line is paid down every Season, so a listing changes position without the seller touching it. A selected point can drift while you are looking at it.
Design response
The tooltip restates price, place in line and Pod Score at the moment you select a listing, so you buy on today’s numbers.
Exact values still matter
A chart is great for spotting a good buy and bad for checking one. People still wanted to sort, scan and copy exact numbers.
Design response
The full listings table stays under the chart, with created date, amount, place, price, fill and expiry, so you can check a buy row by row.
Direction A
A density field behind the listings. Handsome, but it implied a precision the data did not have.
Direction B
The same field with a lighter marker. Still guessing at where any single listing actually sat.
Direction C
Discrete listings with a Pod Score legend. You can point at one and read it. This shipped.
1
Price runs across, place in line runs up. Where a listing sits is the comparison, so nobody has to read a table to make one.
2
Every listing is a point you can select. The tooltip states price, place in line and Pod Score before you commit to anything.
3
Effective Temperature sits beside the price you set, so the tradeoff stays visible while you are still choosing.
Tradeoffs
What I said no to
The prettiest version of this chart was the least honest one. Most of the calls came down to not letting the visual promise more than the data could back up.
| We could have | We chose | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A smooth density field behind the listings | Discrete points with a Pod Score legend | The field looked great and implied a precision the data didn’t have. You can point at a dot and read it. You can’t do that with a gradient. |
| Replacing the table with the chart | Chart on top, the same listings in a table below | The chart is for finding a good buy. The table is for checking it. Dropping either one made the other worse. |
| Collapsing everything into one “value” number | Price and place on the axes, Pod Score as a guide | A single score hides why a listing is cheap. Pod Score colors the dots so the strong ones stand out, but price and place stay on the axes so you can see the tradeoff before you buy. |
Before1 / 2
A table of listings and two sliders. Finding a good buy meant reading rows and doing the maths yourself.
After2 / 2
The same listings as a market. Price against place in line, with the one you are looking at called out.
Pinto's Pod Market now reads like a market, not a spreadsheet, and the chart components carry into every surface that shows the Pod Line.
~40%
of orders now run through automation built on this chart
1 library
covering every transaction state
Shipped
live on Pinto, 2025