Headless Brands

Who or what can claim authority to manage a brand when ownership of a protocol is distributed among a network of users? In particular, who has the authority when those same users are often also responsible for the productive work of the project? When users own equity and stand to gain from increased adoption, those same users are strongly incentivi... See more

Bitcoin is what we're terming a headless brand. While Bitcoin was named and given a visual identity by a single visionary founder, Satoshi Nakamoto chose to remain pseudonymous, and has now completely disappeared from the public. All subsequent brand collateral—visual assets, messaging and positioning, and more—have been created by groups of commun... See more

Projects gain additional social proof from the companies that build on top of them. New grassroots narratives such as #DeFi are already emerging from the possibilities of composability in the Ethereum ecosystem. Likewise, brand credibility can be bootstrapped by combining the brands of protocols on top of which new projects build!

We are moving from an era of centralized, bureaucratic value creation firms to an era of decentralized, permissionless value creation networks. As organizational models change, so too will the intangible cultural artifacts created by these new institutional forms. Brands, narratives, memes—we now choose our own headless gods.

In summary, Bitcoin's shifting brand results from three main characteristics: 1) Bitcoin is headless, completely lacking a centralized entity which attempts to control its brand presence; 2) its defining protocol design decisions are immutable; 3) its users are financial stakeholders and workers in the network, both of whom stand to gain from incre... See more

Traditional broadcast media offered corporations a high degree of control over audience exposure. Customers received consistent messaging about brands directly through advertisements in print, radio, and television media. However, the person-to-person transmission of this information **was limited by the communications infrastructure available to c... See more

If each token and protocol has its own brand, why should token ownership take the banal metaphor of a generic "wallet" with numbers? Could coins and cryptoassets bring their own interfaces to users' smartphones? Can coin ownership be turned into an aesthetic or a collective experience, in which the curation of one’s own cryptoassets portfolio can f... See more

Ethereum is an instructive example in which the project's brand is largely associated with its founder. Vitalik is probably the only individual in the Ethereum ecosystem with the capability of personally altering its brand identity. However, the Ethereum team has also made design choices which show an effort to "keep the identity small," such as th... See more

A decentralized brand is a fiction made real, an egregore, a self-sovereign entity that lives through the imagination and belief of many. One does not simply decide what a decentralized brand "is." It is not something that can be created by focus groups, strategists, and identity designers. Like Bitcoin, a decentralized brand has its own autonomy, ... See more