In crypto, brand is often an afterthought. Something that comes after product, after whitepapers, after tech milestones. Brand is a function of identity, and identity is a strategy.

As an example, @boundless_xyz might look different than what you expect from a deeply technical infrastructure project. There’s glass. There’s beige. It’s beautiful. Ethereal. Calm. What does any of that have to do with ZK or proving systems?

Everything.

Building a brand is one of my favorite parts of launching something new. But it’s not just about colors or fonts or layouts. It’s about sitting with hard questions about who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. It’s about taking your positioning seriously and letting it lead presence.

Just because its crypto, just because its infra it does NOT have to be dry. If you have no choice but to articulate the tech (yes all of us), contrast it with something opposing to create friction. Friction is your best friend for being memorable.

Boundless is a verrry technical infrastructure protocol. Still, we’re communicating something huge. A change in how chains, infrastructure, and internet-native systems work with each other. Something abstract and complex. So we made a deliberate decision: to contrast that complexity with clarity and beauty and something cute with the berries.

Crypto branding tends to fall into two extremes: sleek minimalism or chaotic meme maximalism. Surprisingly i’d consider both of these homogenous and usually lacking the thing that grasps you: friction. In essence: Contrast in brand representation involves strategically creating differences across visual elements, brand personality, positioning, and emotional appeals to differentiate a brand, capture attention, shape perceptions. = successss.

I feel like i have to say this but most only think in product marketing terms, which is why its harder for them to implement this. You have to do both product and brand marketing, they go hand in hand for making a tech product succeed in a busy landscape. What is the difference?

words by @elan_miller

A brand doesn’t have to explain everything. It just needs to invite you in, make you feel something and keep you thinking.

Asking hard questions to discover your positioning strategy and core values will lead you to have a solid base for all following steps.

The aspects you will need to investigate to get started:

• core change the project drives

• core values

• brand persona

• pillars of your story

For Boundless, one of the central inspirations for the brand was light. Not just visually, but conceptually.

reka

@reka_eth

we do many things but what we definitely do is make reaaally pretty websites to make our infrastructure project accessible

verifiable computing will never be the same. go verify the signal.

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4:10 PM • Aug 6, 2025

Light is abundant. It fills the space that contains it. It doesn’t get smaller by illuminating others. That’s what Boundless wants to be. A force that makes the pie bigger. That expands access. That shines clarity onto systems that have been obscured by jargon and gatekeeping.

You see this in our visual choices: the way light refracts through glass creates those soft, prismatic effects in our graphics.

Abundance, transparency, optimism = those are our values. And they come through not just in the product, but in the visuals, the language, and the energy of everything we create.

Continuing into words, you will need memes, sayings and repetition to continue this. Consistently forwarding your values as an extension to existing visual language created. Which comes first? Up to you. I try to do words first then visuals, but then again i am a writer. Go use pinterest, ai, are.na, and get inspired visually too.

One of our mantras at Boundless is to think bigger. A tagline and a prompt we return to every time we’re making a decision. Does this feel bigger than us? Does this move the industry forward? Does it reflect what we truly believe in?

It’s embedded into everything we do, wear, say or do. Even our merch :)

We don’t want Boundless to be a logo on a site or a Twitter account you scroll past. We want it to be a movement. A gravitational field. A space that attracts people who believe in building something beyond speculation.

That means creating a brand that isn’t just for today.

Every brand is real estate in the decentralized consciousness of the internet. It’s how people perceive you, how they relate to you, where they place you in the map of the ecosystem, and what ideas they associate with you over time.

And believe it or not the public perception has an almost esoteric affect on the trajectory of your project. Why? Because it always comes from an internal prescription of the ideal reality, if it is not reflected publicly in the most authentic way, it is inherently limited.

If you do it right and your brand is built on a clear identity and rooted in real values, it starts to move on its own. It creates culture. It generates alignment. It becomes something bigger than your team. Bigger than your launch. Bigger than your roadmap.

That’s what we’re building at Boundless.

Not just a protocol.

A presence.

A signal.

A light.