If you spend enough time on Crytpo-Twitter, you’ll hear that web3 has a branding issue. As is often the case with anything brand-related, the agreement on what ails the patient pretty much ends there. Depending on the person, web3 projects are too difficult to navigate, have a mediocre user experience, or it’s Apple’s fault.

In other words, while people may not know what the problem is with the web3 brand, it is generally clear to them that the lack of communication of their promises and values ​​is an obstacle to mass adoption. In other words, what web3 needs is just a good branding team to come up with some fancier words and prettier images and everything will work out.

How does a permissionless, decentralized blockchain make this product better and more valuable to consumers than what is currently on the market?

It’s similar to a marketing 101 question I ask when looking at different projects. More often than not, the response that comes back is not much more than a collection of web3 buzzwords that add up to nothing. I understand that it is permissionless, decentralized, and leverages tokenomics to create a new value chain. But, as people rattle off the usual collection of web3 technowords of “brand promises,” it’s clear they’re only talking to people who already believe web3 is the answer because generally everyone agrees on the problems web3 solves. .

So far, most of the projects that make up web3, if we exclude get-rich-quick and/or Ponzi schemes, are projects where decentralized blockchain technology is the benefit. This is a ridiculously simple but incredibly important nuance. When it comes to web3, technology is the benefit.

As a result, the product being built requires you to be excited about the technology first, and then the value of the product comes later. Which is completely backwards. The idea of ​​a public blockchain is great, but you know what else is really cool? Microservices. But you don’t see many consumer-facing brands selling “a social platform built to harness the power of microservices for a massively scalable community without the overhead of traditional monolithic architectures.”

Crypto and blockchain are not just value enablers. They ARE the value. The technology itself IS inseparable from the product, so the technology IS the product. This is where the disconnect between web3 Technorati and regular people occurs. People in the web3 club like the street cred that comes with being in the web3 club. They are cooler than norms when they say gm! on Twitter, or have the right avatar, or get philosophical about deflationary tokenomics.

Therein lies the origin of the web3 branding problem. Can you imagine if Amazon actually marketed itself as “harnessing the power of CRM to deliver the products you want?” However, if you look back to the early days of blockchain and listen to the thought leaders, web3:blockchain is the brand promise. It doesn’t matter if the market NEEDS a specific solution powered by a public blockchain. The simple fact that it is, that’s the benefit.

Decentralization, privacy, self-custody and tokenomics are the value. If it’s easier, faster, better, or cheaper, that’s incidental. What matters is that the old system is bad, the new system is good, and that should be enough.

This is the heart of the challenge that web3 will have to overcome if it wants to go mainstream. You see, the brand that is web3 today is the brand that the early builders wanted to build in the first place. In that way, they were very disciplined and, frankly, very successful. The problem is that, if history and general human behavior are any guide, they are not representative of the mainstream now, nor will they ever be.

For web3 to scale, you don’t need to fix your branding problem. Instead, you need a complete rebrand from scratch. Because with all the money being poured into the space, along with all the talent, you’re going to have to leave behind your reverence for technology and instead focus on delivering benefits that are simple, meaningful, and valuable at scale.

There are already some projects that are beginning to discover how and why blockchain technology, with its transparency, decentralization, liquidity, and low audience, can be a game changer without resorting to additional complexity for consumers. They can be pure blockchain games, or they can do what really successful companies do, which is combine technologies invisibly to customers in order to optimize the value they offer while making a nice profit for themselves.

For those other blockchain projects that don’t make that critical transition? I wouldn’t bet my coins on their chains.

By Kevin Susman, Vice President of Brand and Communications, MATRIXX Software