LunarCrush 2026 — Rebuilding Compare
LunarCrush · Product design · Mar to Apr 2026 · Shipped
Compare used to be a three-asset, 24-hour, price-first page in the old app. In the 2026 workspace it became something else: unlimited topics across any category, adaptive metrics, and the contextual layer around the comparison — prediction markets, top creators, trending topics, top posts.
Of all the features in LunarCrush, Compare is the one I kept underselling. It looked simple — put two assets side by side, line up their numbers — and for a long time that's what it was. The 2026 rebuild turned it into something else. This is that story.
What Compare used to be
In the old app, Compare was a page that did exactly what its name said and not much more. Three assets wide, one line chart for price over 24 hours, a table with AltRank and price underneath, and a Buy button that never belonged there.
It worked for the simplest case — two or three cryptocurrencies, a quick glance at the last day — and nothing else. The interval was hardcoded. The chart was single-metric. Asset names got truncated inside the pills ("Bitcoin B..."). And the thing that mattered most, LunarCrush's actual differentiator — social data — was absent from the default view. We were competing in Compare on the one axis where we shouldn't be competing at all.
The breaking case
The tell was a bug I could reproduce in ten seconds: compare Bitcoin with the Los Angeles Rams.
The system accepted the pair and returned dashes for everything. AltRank: ---. Price: ---. An NFL team has no AltRank and no price, but Compare never admitted that — it just rendered empty cells and left the user to guess what went wrong. The feature was leaking its own constraints into the UI.
Jon had already written the rule that would fix this in DEV-9921: if non-financial assets are being displayed, only show social metrics. No AltRank, no Galaxy Score, no price — just Social Dominance. If a financial asset is added back into the mix, surface the More menu and the richer metrics return. The rule was right. The implementation in the old app never quite carried it.
Compare in the 2026 workspace
The rebuild kept the page — /compare/{asset1}/{asset2}?metric=...&interval=... is still a first-class URL, right next to /topic/, /category/, /creator/, /developers. What changed is everything that happens inside it.
The chart now plots any LunarCrush metric you pick — Engagements, Mentions, Creators, Sentiment, and the More Metrics dropdown for the financial layer. The interval pills go from 1D through ALL. The asset pills carry avatars, handles, and the percent-change for the selected metric. The metric table underneath uses real bars and tabular figures so the comparison reads at a glance.
The color-avatar mapping is the invisible glue. Bitcoin's line, Bitcoin's pill, Bitcoin's row are all the same orange. Solana's are the same purple. You never have to build a mental lookup table for what color means what.
Unlimited assets, automatic degradation
There's no hard cap. If you want to compare six topics across categories, you just keep adding them.
Here the mix is deliberate: Bitcoin, Solana, Memecoins, Stacks, United States of America, and Fashion. Two tier-1 cryptocurrencies, a category, a smaller coin, a country, and a concept. The old rule kicks in automatically — no price row, no AltRank, just the social layer. No dashes, no empty cells, no surprise. The page adapts silently to what the inputs can support.
That's the payoff of pushing topic into the primitive layer of the app. Compare doesn't ask what type these things are; it asks what metrics they have in common, renders those, and hides the rest.
Beyond side-by-side
The version of Compare I care about most isn't the top of the page — it's what happens below the chart.
Once two topics are in frame, Compare pulls the context around them. Related Prediction Markets — real money betting on Bitcoin price targets, surfaced in a sortable table. Top Creators — the five accounts driving the most signal across both topics, not just one.
And then trending topics and top posts:
A word cloud with two-color legend (BTC orange, SOL purple) showing which narratives belong to which topic and which are shared. Underneath it, the raw posts driving the most engagement across both.
This is the section that made me realise Compare had a bigger job. Side-by-side isn't the feature — it's the entry point. The feature is use these two or three or eight topics as a lens to look at the social environment around them. Prediction markets show where money is betting; creators show who's shaping the conversation; trending topics show the vocabulary. Compare becomes a little dashboard built out of everything the rest of LunarCrush already knows how to render.
The URL earns its keep
A side-effect of building on top of the topic primitive is that Compare has a clean, shareable URL shape. /compare/bitcoin/solana?metric=mentions&interval=1w encodes the whole state of the page. Reload it, send it on X, paste it into a Slack — same view every time.
The natural language path collapses into the same URL. "Compare BTC and ETH mindshare this week" resolves to /compare/bitcoin/ethereum?metric=mentions&interval=1w and renders the page. The AI isn't a separate mode; it's another way of writing the URL. The share image for that URL is the next build — reviving DEV-10053, canceled the first time around, now back on the table because the use case is real. Comparisons get screenshotted and reshared constantly on X and Telegram.
What's open
Compare in its current form closes the gap between the old /vs/ URL and the new topic-based app. The next iteration — DEV-10305, "Build Compare page" — is where I'm working with Jon right now to decide a handful of things that didn't get written down the first time:
- Does Compare stay as a dedicated page or become a pattern that expands inline from a topic? Staying as a page, but with the entry action on every topic card.
- What's the hard limit on comparable assets? None — mirror what staging already does.
- How does the AI enter Compare? By inference — the prompt resolves to the URL.
- Mobile? Already solved in the current staging build; port as-is.
- Share image? Revive DEV-10053.
Once Jon signs off on those, the Figma lands and the next build starts. I'll write the follow-up when it ships.
Role: Head of Design, LunarCrush (Jan 2021–present).
Related work: LunarCrush — The Product (2026) · The Design Underneath · Landing Pages.