Names have power. Startups, parents, and rock bands agonize over them. Good names bring something to life. Bad names invite jokes and skepticism.

In a recent post, Gaby Goldberg brought up how the term wallet is a relatively inadequate name. The reflection made me realize that, honestly, the entire crypto industry is comprised of things with really bad names.

https://gaby.mirror.xyz/0Wq9zk0pZu_s3W1S4BiNcYXw9uSfSVbyGjNPgLHcs18

Including the name of the industry itself. Crypto, web3, blockchain, whatever we call this industry needs a new name. You don’t have a “.com” startup anymore; you have a SaaS startup, or a fintech startup, or a climate tech startup, or a space startup. We don’t classify startups by what they’re built on, but what they are building.

Names have power, and none of the current industry terms we use really describes what we’re building.

• “Crypto” is a poor descriptor. Cryptography is only a single (important!) component of the entire system, and we aren’t all building cryptography startups. The name is also a bit stigmatized today thanks to our ngmi wen-token brethren.

• “Web3” is a whole lot of fluffy nothingness. Most people outside of our tech bubble have very little understanding of the history of the internet. Also, the term feels restrictive. Is Bitcoin “web3 money”? Is Helium really a “web3 platform”, or a new business model for wireless?

  To me at least, web3 feels like a description for new social and gaming projects, not the entirety of the space.

*     “Wtf is web3? You’re telling me there was a web1 and web2?”*

*     — A completely normal human*

• “Blockchain” again has been a bit stigmatized by the “track strawberries on the blockchain”, enterprise, permissioned distributed ledger technology will disrupt everything Big 4 accounting people. Cringe. Probably not the direction we should go either.

All of this jargon is really, really holding back the industry. Names are important. Our names suck. We need a new one. But what should it be?

Crypto is to software what economics is to science - a social science. Crypto is a coordination technology, inherently social. It is built on incentives, coordination, organization. It underpins an extreme breadth of subsectors, including digital economies, cooperative business models, permissionless finance, programmatic incentive structures, money. It is, inherently,

https://twitter.com/naval/status/1497003797377290254?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1497003797377290254%7Ctwgr%5E9f5c950ae3e368fe4067681f3ede2ae418eafa47%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmirror.xyz%2F0x32579e7646bf07A755BE9128f89436a91B90CC7d%2Fs93p4LNOgTmkNDkrprHNODJROv63QP2AhWGv7xt9r18

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1104607281612644352?s=20&t=2dihNugloRNZP9p61JYZZA

EconTech might not be as sexy as ‘web3’ or ‘crypto’, but it’s really what we’re building- digital economic systems. And maybe by making the name of the industry a little more boring, we can do a little less philosophizing and a little more building.

Names have power. Startups, parents, and rock bands agonize over them. Good names bring something to life. Bad names invite jokes and skepticism.

In a recent post, Gaby Goldberg brought up how the term wallet is a relatively inadequate name. The reflection made me realize that, honestly, the entire crypto industry is comprised of things with really bad names.

https://gaby.mirror.xyz/0Wq9zk0pZu_s3W1S4BiNcYXw9uSfSVbyGjNPgLHcs18

Including the name of the industry itself. Crypto, web3, blockchain, whatever we call this industry needs a new name. You don’t have a “.com” startup anymore; you have a SaaS startup, or a fintech startup, or a climate tech startup, or a space startup. We don’t classify startups by what they’re built on, but what they are building.

Names have power, and none of the current industry terms we use really describes what we’re building.

• “Crypto” is a poor descriptor. Cryptography is only a single (important!) component of the entire system, and we aren’t all building cryptography startups. The name is also a bit stigmatized today thanks to our ngmi wen-token brethren.

• “Web3” is a whole lot of fluffy nothingness. Most people outside of our tech bubble have very little understanding of the history of the internet. Also, the term feels restrictive. Is Bitcoin “web3 money”? Is Helium really a “web3 platform”, or a new business model for wireless?

  To me at least, web3 feels like a description for new social and gaming projects, not the entirety of the space.

*     “Wtf is web3? You’re telling me there was a web1 and web2?”*

*     — A completely normal human*

• “Blockchain” again has been a bit stigmatized by the “track strawberries on the blockchain”, enterprise, permissioned distributed ledger technology will disrupt everything Big 4 accounting people. Cringe. Probably not the direction we should go either.

All of this jargon is really, really holding back the industry. Names are important. Our names suck. We need a new one. But what should it be?

Crypto is to software what economics is to science - a social science. Crypto is a coordination technology, inherently social. It is built on incentives, coordination, organization. It underpins an extreme breadth of subsectors, including digital economies, cooperative business models, permissionless finance, programmatic incentive structures, money. It is, inherently,

https://twitter.com/naval/status/1497003797377290254?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1497003797377290254%7Ctwgr%5E9f5c950ae3e368fe4067681f3ede2ae418eafa47%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmirror.xyz%2F0x32579e7646bf07A755BE9128f89436a91B90CC7d%2Fs93p4LNOgTmkNDkrprHNODJROv63QP2AhWGv7xt9r18

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1104607281612644352?s=20&t=2dihNugloRNZP9p61JYZZA

EconTech might not be as sexy as ‘web3’ or ‘crypto’, but it’s really what we’re building- digital economic systems. And maybe by making the name of the industry a little more boring, we can do a little less philosophizing and a little more building.