Why Does Crypto Hate Branding?
Branding in crypto is broken.
You don’t have to look far to see it: clunky UIs, tone-deaf messaging, bad event experiences, and AI-slop content strategies. For an industry that claims to be building the future of the internet, the experiences we’re creating often feel stuck in the past, or worse, like they were never designed for people at all.
Branding Is UX
Branding is user experience. It shapes every moment someone interacts with what you’ve built — from the landing page to onboarding to how you show up on social.
In crypto, it’s still treated like an afterthought. Most projects are shaped by engineering-first thinking. Branding gets pushed to the end, if it shows up at all.
The result? Jargon-filled messaging, incomprehensible positioning, and chaotic visuals that compete for attention but communicate nothing.
And you feel it. Everywhere.
I’ve Lived the Other Side
Before working in crypto, I ran Tee Pee Records, an iconic independent record label. I later worked at Nike, Converse, and Sonos — brands where creative direction isn’t just valued, it’s protected. Where design is sacred. Where every single interaction, digital or physical, is crafted with purpose.
Later, at Ledger, I applied creativity and culture to help take the brand from a niche power-user product to a must-have cultural icon of the space.
Deeply caring about brand experience is still sorely missing in this industry.
Culture, Creativity, and the Crypto Aesthetic Problem
You can’t meme your way to relevance. You can’t shitpost your way to emotional connection. These are things you earn — through clarity, tone, consistency, and design. Through experience.
And through culture and creativity.
These aren’t surface-level decisions. They’re strategic levers for adoption.
We took this approach with our brand.
When we rebranded Reown, we didn’t follow the usual playbook. We didn’t hire one of the same handful of crypto-native agencies. We didn’t flood the brand with gradients, neons, or meme-fueled chaos. We partnered with MODEM, a design and innovation studio known for building cultural and strategic relevance at the intersection of tech, design, and future systems. Their client list includes Nike and OpenAI — and it shows. They helped us build a brand that feels considered, modern, and built to last.
And it’s working.
Reown recently won two Webby Awards for branding and design — and let’s be honest, crypto brands don’t win awards for anything. At all.
That level of intentionality matters. The brands that feel timeless are the ones that were designed to.
Crypto Has Brand ADD
One of crypto’s deepest problems is its collective short attention span. We jump from narrative to narrative, meme to meme, without ever planting a flag. One day it’s DeFi summer. The next it’s NFTs, then DAOs, then L2s, then AI-onchain. Attention cycles dominate everything, and the industry is more focused on momentary hype than meaningful traction.
This shows up in branding, too. Projects change names, identities, and taglines more than CT chases the latest memecoin. But great brands don’t reinvent themselves every week. They stand for something. Think about Apple, Liquid Death, or Stripe. Their tone evolves, but their core identity doesn’t flinch. They know who they are, and they commit to it — visually, emotionally, and strategically.
Crypto needs less “pivot-to-meme” energy and more long-term clarity.
The Brand Gap Is the Adoption Gap
Great brands find their voice not through slick logos or quirky copy, but by knowing who they are, what they stand for, and how to show up. That clarity is what allows a brand to scale. And to bring more people onchain, we need scale badly.
Until we invest in brand with the same seriousness we invest in protocols, we’ll keep building tools nobody wants to use, products nobody understands, and communities that never grow beyond the niche.
Where We Go From Here
In the age of AI, having a unique and identifiable brand will become more important than ever, especially when everyone is using the same tools to generate, write, and build. Brand will be the edge that can’t be automated.
The tools for building meaningful, design-led, emotionally resonant onchain brands already exist. We just need to care enough to use them.
The builders who get this will define the next era of onchain culture.
And I’m here for it.
