Bad vibes from the word “Crypto” call for some new branding

Forget the big reset. Members of the industry known as “crypto” (or is it “blockchain”, “digital assets” or “distributed ledger technology?”) attending this week’s World Economic Forum in the shadow of the crisis known as “FTX” are spurring a major rebrand .

In the wake of the Bahamas-based exchange’s meltdown, “crypto” and “NFTs” (non-fungible tokens) have become trigger words for skeptics who dismiss this technology as useless hot air — much like “blockchain” was viewed in 2018 around the initial coin offering (ICO) bubble, when the Long Island Iced Tea company infamously renamed itself Long Blockchain Corp.

Therefore, a new lexicon (we’re stuck with “crypto” for now) was in question as business leaders tried to convince politicians attending the talkfest in Davos, Switzerland, of the need for constructive regulation or sought agreements, commitment or just acceptance by leaders for mainstream companies that had also proven relevant.

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I’m sure many readers of this column will recoil at this effort. Some may even see it as a centralizing power grab.

Maybe that’s fair. This annual gathering in the Swiss Alps, often cited for hypocrisy, empty talk and elitism, is a lightning rod among many who believe in the potential of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies to turn around the existing unfair global economy. You don’t have to share the conspiracy theorists’ view of WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset” idea to have concerns about the many Davos member companies and institutions whose business models perpetuate the system’s exploitative, centralized power structure.

But it’s also clear that “crypto” is now becoming widely associated with “have-fun-be-bad” crypto bros and with what MIT Digital Currency Initiative director Neha Narula calls “token casinos.” That the word now makes politicians and executives squeamish is a barrier to progress for any crypto industry leader who wants to engage with them.

It might not be so bad to find words that don’t sound so foreign or threatening, words that encapsulate more universally and positively recognized ideas.

Brynly Llyr, the head of blockchain and digital assets at the World Economic Forum, proposed “decentralized systems” as a phrase that accurately describes the function this technology plays without risking a negative association with cryptoculture.

Others are simply resurrecting “blockchain,” hoping it will be more palatable to businesses looking to use these systems to handle business needs. (One concern here is that the word became associated with the “permission” blockchain systems once favored by business consortia, systems that were not really decentralized and added no real value as a result. Today, with businesses increasingly building Web3 strategies on permissionless layer 1 protocols like Ethereum, the retrograde connotation of “blockchain” might not be so bad.)

The industry’s language problem goes beyond the negative connotations of “crypto.” It is also that sensational words lack precision and vital nuances.

For example, there are several types of tokens. These include commodity tokens such as ether (ETH) that power public blockchains; store-of-value assets such as bitcoin (BTC); payment symbols such as USDC; and NFTs, which are essentially markers for scarce digital objects. All are often lumped together under the label “cryptocurrencies”, which promotes an association with the traditional idea of ​​”currencies” and has distinct legal and political connotations.

This imprecision creates problems for participants in this industry when negotiating rules or terms of service with each other and with policy makers and non-crypto businesses.

“Too often we talk past each other,” says David Treat, senior managing director of Accenture’s blockchain practice. “People use an argument about one domain that doesn’t really work with all the others.”

Treat is looking for a taxonomy framework that “allows us to see the interplay between the tokenization of identity, money, and objects, so that we don’t get sucked into a myopic facet of this and miss the broader, important conversation.”

Obsessing over words like this can seem beside the point when the most important thing is to come up with protection against the kind of abuse that led to the FTX collapse. But amid reports that compliance officers are now issuing blanket instructions to banks to block services to any entity affected by “crypto” — if taken literally, a group that includes the likes of Microsoft, Starbucks and, ironically, BNY Mellon — it’s clear that we all need to be clearer with our words.

But who decides? This is not a central marketing department or brand manager who can dictate what branding this industry should use. The market will decide which words to use.

So for now we’re stuck with “crypto.”