Because brands are constrained by the number of people who come in contact with them, they are directly affected by the accessibility and velocity of information.

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

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... 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... 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... See more

In a highly decentralized system, these operations invert such that the community finds product solutions themselves: "market-product fit." Cryptoeconomic protocols are market frameworks looking for potential product applications. The work of exploring parallel narratives, discovering emergent use cases, and testing solutions is distributed among... See more

While brands have traditionally been planned and designed directly by corporations, the rise of networked media has challenged the coherence of centrally-managed brand identities

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... 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... See more