» HADOUKEN « there will be rainbows

Enough about NFTs, let's talk branding Web3

Remember the first time you saw an Emoji? At once futuristic and familiar, it’s no wonder they became generally accepted and then universally loved so quickly. Sure, some hold outs remain—the Emoji’s are corny and Emoji’s ruin the King’s English types are a vocal minority—but overall, since Unicode’s modern developments, their adoption has been astronomical.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, Emoji’s are worth at least 140 characters. For a generation whose attention span is rumored to be shorter than a goldfish’s, Gen Z prefers communicating in this shorthand. Much the same way their Millennial cousins received a high off a perfectly timed comedic reference, Gen Z uses Emojis to showcase a command of niche Internet culture. The deeper you go, the weirder this gets. No place is this more evident than Discord, where custom Pepes and Rainbow Farting Nyan Cats are as common as your mother’s favorite laughing cry Emoji.

If esoteric Emoji use is the tip of the Gen Z is Weird As Hell iceberg, memes are the submerged bummock. Where “meme” is defined as “a unit of cultural information spread by imitation,” Emojis fall directly within that meaning. All of this taken together paints a picture: Gen Z spreads information in zany, often nonsensical (at least to older generations) ways. “Adorkable” marketing reigns supreme: Charmin’s Deuce Destroyer game, Balenciaga’s glow-in-the-dark capsule collection for at-home raves, Taco Bell’s The Craving commercials, Crocs seemingly unlimited catalogue of wacky collaborations. And this is what simply pops into my head at 7:00 a.m. on a Thursday—go ahead, give this a proper think, you’ll find the list endless.

When it comes to Web3, brand and design best practices are borrowing heavily from this energy. Blockchain protocols and decentralized applications built thereupon more readily look toward mythical creatures (like Unicorns and Doges) and cartoonish, tenuously-related random icons (like Sushi and Pancakes) than the trusted crests, gilded nameplates and heritage-depicting insignia of legacy institutions.

When it comes specifically to decentralized finance, this is particularly pronounced: traditional institutions have completely lost the trust of younger generations, and start ups in the space look nothing like them. Having been born into 9/11, grown up during the Great Recession and are now looking for employment during a pandemic that has completely obliterated their faith in and desire to use anything that resembles the traditional financial system, Gen Z is completely unimpressed with incremental improvements to yesterday’s products and services. They are looking for something entirely different.

Oh, wow, Wells Fargo—you’ve implemented Zelle into your user interface! And I can send up to a few hundred bucks per day at T-3 settlement speeds? Thanks, but no thanks. I think I’ll just send these stablecoins through my Metamask, instantaneously. A savings account that earns me .15% interest? I’d rather try for 10% by parking some crypto in this weird 90s-inspired UI at Curve. Or maybe become a real DeFi Degen and YOLO into these 500% APYs at GUM or some other insane Pancake Swap liquidity pool. Bye-eeeeeee.

Now, there are some new institutions in and around the crypto space that are more buttoned up—Coinbase, Gemini etc. They draw from the energy of this revolutionary time, but at the end of the day, they are looking to play nice with and connect to the traditional payment rails and legacy banking system. Indeed, Gemini’s 2019 advertising campaign was titled “Crypto without Chaos.” I believe that summarizes things nicely. One must applaud them for their contributions to the space and thank them for creating such incredible on-ramps to Web3, but let’s be real, their products and services are not that far from the status quo. To be fair, that’s probably a major factor to their successes, and it may be a harbinger of things to come: in order to gain mass adoption, perhaps it’s necessary that these protocols and networks clean up their image and become more familiar to the average Bob and Karen—if they can’t open a PDF, do you really think they would find any of the above-mentioned products and services charming or inviting?

At the end of the day, Web3 is speed running the history of our financial institutions, so there’s bound to be some tension in the design and experience—tension between appealing to young pioneers and appearing safe and friendly to those older generations who are less technically adept and more suspicious of off-center brand messaging. I think back to the early days of Facebook, when only a handful of colleges had access to the platform. Zuck would embed movie quotes in the footers of each page. Quotes like “Too close for missiles, I’m switching to guns.” Those footers disappeared a long time ago, and there was a reason behind that decision. Are things different this time? Maybe. Grab some popcorn, it’s going to be fun to watch.