been reflecting alot on the growth of both chain abstraction and our brand
@ParticleNtwrk this week
a year ago, we were just one of many AA/UX projects in the space, no particularly unique moat. as a brand, we blended in.
then, as I've tweeted before, we took a leap and focused 100% of our resources on making chain abstraction a reality.
back then, the vision was still pretty vague, but we saw this as potentially being a massive unlock for the industry, and we felt that we could help make it a reality given our prior focus on AA & UX
we were at stage 0:
- aligned with a narrative that had little to no traction (alongside some earlier players like
@FrontierDotTech @SocketProtocol @NEARProtocol, who took similar risks)
- sitting with a brand that didn't have much presence of awareness outside of a few closed circles
so, we had two things that we needed to do at that point (from a brand standpoint).
1. position ourselves and our value proposition clearly
2. help establish chain abstraction as a narrative and vertical
with these things in mind, I spent weeks researching examples of other organizations who have achieved something similar; out of all of them,
@celestia was the biggest, and clearest success story.
built the whole modular narrative from the ground up, positioned themselves extremely clearly, and grew one of the most recognizable infrastructure brands in crypto.
I spent alot of time analyzing what they did, and had a few takeaways:
1. you need to make it clear both what your brand is doing and why its important in less than two sentences. ("you cannot be everything to everyone")
2. take responsibility for pushing the narrative beyond your own brand. grow it, and you grow with it
3. people connect with people far faster than they connect with brands
there were other things but above all, these three things stuck with me the most: clear positioning and relevance, clear narrative definition and responsibility, and a figurehead for people to connect with.
@ekrahm is a legend and his website is an actual gold mine. early this year, I spent hours just reading through everything here and taking notes.
with these takeaways in mind, we did a few things.
to start, we overhauled our brand; our tagline, our website, and how we communicate our value proposition to everyone else.
it wasn't perfect at the time (and still isn't), but we eventually came to a tagline: "one account, one balance, any chain"
6 words that tell you what we do and its functional relevance.
we also established a simpler, more streamlined way to look at the positioning of various projects in chain abstraction: categorizing everything as either "account-level", "application-level", or "blockchain-level"
this framework allows you to very clearly understand the independent problem being solved and the target audience by each layer, and the dynamics of collaboration/competition between them.
we used particle (universal accounts) as an example of account-level chain abstraction.
after establishing clear positioning for ourselves and a framework to understand positioning within the larger vertical, we realized that the term itself "chain abstraction" had very loose social consensus around what it actually was and wasn't
is it fixing multi-chain friction? all onchain friction? is it the obfuscation of chains? how does it differ from cross-chain?
so we built a definition for it and did our best to generate some consensus around its scope.
"a user experience exempt from the manual processes required to interact with multiple chains"
okay, now we know what chain abstraction is and its end-experience, and we know how we can roughly place projects building within the vertical.
still, we needed to be more front-and-center. so, reluctantly, I started tweeting more and more, slowly over time. eventually I realized something that
@0xASK wrote about recently, which is that growing a personal brand is simple. "just fucking tweet"
so I spent more time on this and, at the same time, began pushing for as many podcasts and external content contributions as possible.
"make your brand omnipresent" - this includes both personal brands and your organization.
throughout this whole growth stage of establishing ChA, our positioning, and my own personal brand,
@therollupco @andyyy helped alot in pushing ChA with us. chads
over a few months we ended up at a point where we had a clear position, the narrative and its goal was clear, and my own personal brand was growing.
now, we've undeniably gone through a transformation compared to 1 year ago. both particle and the ChA vertical as a whole.
very proud of the progress we've made. lots of work to do still in making chain abstraction a truly impactful shift long-term; 2025 is going to be a massive year for this.
btw, try
@UseUniversalX