How Ashfall turned a card shape into the Raycash brand system

Raycash takes its name from two ideas that meet in one place: cash, the substance of money, banking and daily life, and rays, warm and fast and frictionless, like sunlight. The brand sits at the intersection of the two: self-custodial money that moves like light. The product itself is a consumer banking app for holding, sending and spending money that stays in the customer’s own custody. Its balances are held in stablecoins – digital money pegged to everyday currencies – kept private by encryption, the cryptography that scrambles financial data. Raycash spent a year building that encryption inside cryptographic security firm Zama before spinning out as a consumer product, with Prague-based design studio Ashfall brought in to turn the technology into a brand. The strategy resisted positioning Raycash as “crypto, but for everyone.” Ashfall let the technology take a backseat and placed the brand firmly in consumer banking, making self-custodial money feel like a natural part of early mainstream adopters’ lives. “The first impression had to feel like banking, and the reason to believe comes from the technology behind it,” explains Founder & Design Director Martin Ehrlich. Co-founder & Chief Product Officer Tom Allison wanted it to feel normal. “Self-custody should feel like a better version of personal banking: clear, safe, useful, easy to understand,” he details. What emerged is a fintech brand where lightness, warmth and movement communicate accessibility without ever feeling too technical or futuristic. The concept appears first in the logo, introducing two behaviours at once. In the wordmark, light does the work in motion. “We wanted the wordmark itself to express that,” Ehrlich explains, “light moving through the letters themselves, then breaking through them almost like a prism.” The card shape is the moving part. Built from a single focal point, it passes through the logo and tilts in three dimensions as it moves.