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... 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!

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

A brand is the complete set of concepts, expectations, impressions, and reputations that are associated with a given entity

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

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.

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

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.