▶ If you want to discover the best Web3 strategies ▶ if you're passionate about the design of the next internet ▶ if you're building an onchain brand join /brand3 https://modbot.sh/channels/brand3/join?c=FFC3FF

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Shedding. Trees don’t fight it when their leaves fall. They don’t cling to every piece of green, trying to keep summer alive a few weeks longer. They simply let go. Quietly. Naturally. Almost as if they trusted that the cycle knows better than they do. Humans are much worse at this. We hold on to everything: notifications, deadlines, open tabs, tiny resentments, unfinished conversations. We move through the days, but inside we’re carrying a forest that never sheds. No wonder it’s hard to breathe. Shedding is the word. Shedding work for a weekend. Shedding the constant connection to feeds and messages. Shedding the armor we wear even at home. Not to escape, but to reset. To sit with yourself. To look at the person you share your life with and, for once, not have a screen in the middle. To talk slowly, to walk without a destination, to remember why this story started. Like the leaves, some things are meant to fall: Old expectations, roles that no longer fit, habits that keep you busy but not alive. When you let them go, you’re not “losing” parts of you—you’re making room. For rest. For new questions. For a version of you that is a bit more honest, a bit more kind. Every season of shedding is, deep down, an act of love. Love for yourself: “I don’t have to hold it all the time.” Love for the person next to you: “I choose to be here, fully, without half my mind somewhere else.” The trees don’t apologize when they go bare. They know that, sooner or later, new leaves will arrive. Maybe we need that same faith: trusting that, after we disconnect and let go, we won’t be emptier—we’ll be lighter, and more ready for everything that wants to grow next.

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Generosity is one of the quiet superpowers of onchain branding. At first glance, giving away tokens looks like a bad idea. If value is scarce, why “dilute” it with an airdrop? That’s a very primitive way of seeing things—like thinking a gift only matters by its price tag. In reality, the smartest airdrops don’t exist to dump tokens into random wallets, but to reward the people who actually build the brand with you: the ones who show up, test, vote, give feedback, and move the metrics that matter. Ty Tokenization lets brands turn that generosity into a system. Instead of applause that disappears, there’s a ledger. You can see who participated, who stayed, who cared enough to play the long game. Airdrops become a way to share upside more fairly and to measure loyalty and impact in a transparent way. In Web3 terms, good branding is not just how you look or sound—it’s how you decide who gets to own a piece of what you’re creating. That’s the spirit behind BRND. From day one, the goal has been simple: if the community is the one discovering, ranking, and giving reputation to brands, that same community deserves a share of the value being created. This first airdrop might feel small in absolute numbers, but it’s a seed. Together, by using BRND, holding it, and building with it, we’re the ones who can decide how big that seed becomes. The real upside is shared: the more we grow the ecosystem, the more meaningful those tokens get—for the brands, for the users, and for the story we’re writing onchain.

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Returning is underrated in branding. Every year around this time, a lot of people go back home. You walk the same streets, see the same faces, feel the same old smells. It’s emotional, but it’s also a quiet audit: “Who was I then? Who am I now? What have I actually built in between?”. Brands need that kind of return too. Going back to your origins doesn’t mean becoming nostalgic or stuck. It means revisiting the first promises, the early energy, the reason you existed before metrics, investors, or roadmaps. What did you want to fix? Who did you want to help? What part of that is still alive—and what got lost along the way? Good strategy is often a loop, not a straight line. Every so often, a brand has to “go home”: * Back to old decks and notes to remember the original intent. * Back to early users to hear why they fell in love in the first place. * Back to the first design decisions to see what still feels true and what is just visual noise now. Looking back is not the opposite of innovation. It’s one of the best ways to create it. The same way stepping back helps you see a painting better, returning to your roots gives you perspective to choose the next move with more clarity. You can decide what to preserve, what to upgrade, and what to finally let go of. Branding, at its core, is a long trip where you leave home, explore, get lost, and then come back with new eyes. The brands that grow well are not the ones that never change; they’re the ones that keep a living connection with where they started. They know how to return, recharge their meaning, and then step forward again with more intention. Sometimes the most strategic thing a brand can do is exactly that: go back home, remember who it is, and from there design where it wants to go next. 🥇floc* - @floc 🥈degen - /degen 🥉brand3 - /brand3

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Some brands just feel instantly likable. You see their logo, a little mascot, the way they talk, and there’s this quiet “I like these people” feeling you can’t fully explain. That sympathy is powerful. It pulls you in before you’ve even tried the product. Is that only about the founder’s personal brand? Sometimes, yes. A visible, human founder can make everything feel warmer and closer. But sympathy can absolutely be designed. It lives in tone of voice, in color, in how you handle mistakes, in what you celebrate, and in how easy you make things for people. It’s a strategic choice: “We want to be approachable, curious, a bit goofy” versus “We want to look distant and serious.” In Web3, “being nice” used to be almost illegal. Early on everything felt dark, geeky, very technical. Same grids, same gradients, same blue hexagon screaming: *this is blockchain, be careful*. Then NFTs arrived and a lot of designers, illustrators, and weird creatives jumped into the space—and suddenly brands got softer, more playful, more human. Mascots, characters, friendly interfaces: sympathy became part of the game, not a weakness. Today there are more fun, fresh, cheerful Web3 brands, especially around characters and community‑driven art. And that’s not a trend, it’s survival. Differentiate or die. Nobody wants to spend hours a day in an ecosystem that feels like a cold trading terminal. People stay where they feel seen, welcomed, even a little bit loved. In the end, sympathy in branding is not decoration; it’s infrastructure. It shapes how much people forgive you, how fast they come back after a mistake, and how proudly they recommend you. In Web3, where the tech can be heavy and abstract, a genuinely kind, sympathetic brand might be the strongest “moat” you can build. 🥇beeper - @beeper 🥈indexy - @indexy 🥉remix - /remix

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After several intense months of work, the new version of BRND is finally here... We’ve laid out all the details for you in the latest /brand3 @paragraph https://paragraph.com/@brand3/brnd-v2 https://brnd.land/login

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Discussion is usually treated like a problem in branding, but it’s actually proof that something is alive. When people argue, react, or push back around a brand, it means there’s energy there. The real question isn’t “How do we avoid conflict?” but “What do we do with it?”. First layer: users vs brand — When a product changes direction—new pricing, new feature, new focus—the first reaction is often friction. People feel something is being taken from them, or done *to* them instead of *with* them. How a brand handles that moment is pure strategy: * If it hides, gaslights, or ignores, the discussion turns into resentment and churn. * If it explains, listens, and actually adjusts, the discussion becomes co‑creation. The same conflict, two completely different brand stories. Second layer: brands using “discussion” as a narrative tool. — Some brands intentionally step into hot topics: mental health, climate, gender, money, power. They design campaigns not just to “communicate a message” but to spark debate. Done well, this positions the brand as a cultural actor, not just a vendor. Done badly, it feels like opportunism. The line is simple but hard: are you willing to stay in the conversation after the campaign ends, or was it just a stunt? Third layer: people arguing about brands. — Friends debating which platform to use, which chain is “the future”, which project actually cares about its community. That’s unpaid media, but it’s also unpaid strategy. Every discussion between people is a referendum on your positioning: what you stand for, how consistent you are, how you behave when nobody’s watching. From a branding point of view, discussion is not noise you have to suppress; it’s signal you have to design for. * You can build products and narratives that invite honest disagreement instead of fake consensus. * You can create spaces—forums, town halls, AMAs—where people feel safe to challenge decisions. * You can turn criticism into roadmap, and tension into clarity about what the brand will and won’t do. In the end, brands don’t get to choose *whether* people will talk. They only get to choose what kind of conversations they want to provoke, and how present they’ll be inside them. A mature brand doesn’t fear discussion. It knows that in every argument, someone is rewriting what that brand means—and it wants to be part of that rewrite, not just the silent subject of it. 🥇paragraph - @paragraph 🥈teller - @teller 🥉house - @farhouse

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Childhood is where branding really starts, long before we ever call it that. It’s the cereal box on the table, the jingle from a toy commercial, the startup sound of a console that still gives you goosebumps. Those things weren’t “campaigns” to us. They were tiny pieces of our world that felt safe, fun, and full of possibility. Crypto barely touches that feeling. Most Web3 brands talk to traders, degens, and builders obsessed with charts and drops. Almost nobody speaks to the kid still living inside those same people. Where are the onchain brands for children? Where are the playful wallets, the soft on‑ramps, the stories and characters a tech‑geek parent would actually want to explore with their kid on a Sunday afternoon? Other tech has gone there already. Robotics has kits, programmable toys, small robots that make you learn by playing together. In blockchain and AI, the default vibe is speculation, dashboards, and “number go up”. It’s hard to invite your kid into a space that looks more like a trading floor than a playground. Now imagine the opposite. A wallet that works like a digital piggy bank you share. Smart contracts as tiny family missions. NFTs as memories you build together, not as flex. DAOs that feel like schoolyard clubs with responsibility and kindness built in. Brands that design first for curious parents who love technology and want to introduce it with care, not fear. Branding in crypto doesn’t need more hype. It needs more childhood. More softness in the visuals, more warmth in the language, more stories about sharing instead of extracting. Less trading and more generosity. Less asking and more giving. The next important Web3 brands won’t just be the ones with perfect tokenomics. They’ll be the ones a grown‑up remembers years from now as “the first project I explored with my kid”. That’s the kind of brand that doesn’t just live onchain. It lives in people’s lives. 🥇beeper - @beeper 🥈cody - @codygame 🥉bracky - @bracky

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Uncomfortable brands don’t exist to please the moment. They exist to disturb it, to press on the pressure points of a culture that would rather stay aligned, quiet, and predictable. These are the brands that don’t just “fit in” to society—they push it forward, even when it hurts. Uncomfortable branding is rarely discussed because it refuses the usual playbook of being likable, neutral, and universally accepted. Instead, it behaves more like art or underground music: it challenges norms, introduces new symbols, and forces people to pick a side. It doesn’t chase reach at any cost; it chases truth, tension, and relevance to the few who are ready to listen. These brands feel closer to counterculture than to commerce. They show up with raw aesthetics, inconvenient messages, and behaviors that don’t optimize for conversion, but for conversation. Their campaigns might look like protest posters, strange installations, or cryptic drops that only make sense to those paying real attention. They don’t smooth the edges; they sharpen them. To build an uncomfortable brand is to accept friction as a feature, not a bug. You’re willing to be misunderstood now in order to be meaningful later. You’re okay with criticism, backlash, and confusion, because all of that is proof that you’re touching something real. Most brands try to avoid discomfort; the rare ones that lean into it often become reference points for a generation. Not every project can or should take this path. But the few that manage to channel the energy of art, music, and contracultural movements into their branding end up rewriting what “normal” looks like. They don’t just sell products; they encode new behaviors, values, and patterns into the culture. Those are the brands that may never be universally loved—but they will be impossible to forget. 🥇bitcoin - /bitcoin 🥈nouns - @nouns 🥉zora - @zora

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Indifference is a verdict. In branding, it’s the silent signal that a story, a product or a presence simply didn’t land anywhere meaningful. And yet, the opposite of indifference is not always noise, spectacle or shouting the loudest; it’s being remembered for the right reasons. “Not leaving anyone indifferent” sounds like the perfect mantra, but taken literally it can push brands into chasing shock, gimmicks or constant surprise. That path can generate short spikes of attention, but it often erodes trust and coherence. When everything is designed to impress, nothing feels truly honest. The real strategic question is not “How do we stand out at all costs?” but “How do we matter, to the right people, in the right way, over time?”. Sometimes that means choosing the shadows for a while: building quietly, refining the product, listening more than speaking, letting consistency and usefulness become the differentiator. Other times it means stepping into the spotlight with a bold gesture that clearly states who you are and what you will never compromise on. Branding has the power to modulate that duality: to decide when to surprise and when to simply show up with humility and clarity. A brand can be different without being loud, and can be calm without being invisible. The most interesting brands are those that accept this tension and play with it, knowing that being “indifferent or different” is not just a tactical choice—it’s a way of being, and the lens through which the world will learn to perceive them.

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Nerves are the price you pay for caring. They don’t show up in the brief or the brand book. They show up five minutes before launch—after months of work—when the cursor hovers over “deploy” and suddenly nothing feels safe anymore. Your chest tightens, your brain rehearses every worst‑case scenario, and for a moment it’s easier to freeze than to ship. But in branding, nerves are proof of risk—and without risk there is no relevance. Big moves, new versions, bolder stories: they all pass through that tunnel of doubt. The job is not to avoid it, but to walk through it with your eyes open. You run the checks. You lean on the team. You hit “go” anyway. Later, when the brand is out in the wild and the world doesn’t collapse, those same nerves harden into experience. Next time they’ll still be there, but you’ll recognize them for what they are: a sign you’re pushing the work far enough to matter—and an invitation to become better than the version of you that pressed deploy today.

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Desire is the quiet engine behind every unforgettable brand. Think of the candle ritual on the 11th and the 22nd. One day is for asking, the other for thanking. First you name a wish, then you recognize the progress—however small—toward it. That rhythm of intention and gratitude is exactly what the best brands learn to design: they spark desire in people, and then they work, día a día, to be worthy of that desire. Wanting to reach a goal or become a better person is not so different from what a great brand should pursue. A brand that stops desiring more—more meaning, more usefulness, more truth—slides into comfort and repetition. A brand that keeps “wishing” with focus sets new standards, experiments, and refuses to stay still. Branding is, in many ways, the craft of giving unreal emotions to inert things: turning code, packaging, or interfaces into hope, anticipation, curiosity. Some brands manage to light that inner candle in their users. They make you look forward to the next release, the next feature, the next interaction. They live in that space between what exists and what could exist—the same space where personal desire lives. When they deliver, the cycle closes: wish, experience, gratitude. When they fail, the desire migrates somewhere else. Maybe that’s the real challenge for the new wave of onchain brands: not only to be functional, but to become part of people’s private rituals for growth—reminding them, every time they interact, of who they want to be and what they still hope to build. 🥇Bitcoin - /bitcoin 🥈Ethereum - @ethereum 🥉Solana - @solana

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Routine is the invisible operating system of every strong brand. Behind every “big” brand moment there’s a quiet stack of small, repeated actions: showing up, shipping, listening, adjusting, again and again. Miniapps have understood this better than most. Many of them are not just products—they’re habit machines. They invite you to return every day, cast a vote, check a feed, track progress, or complete a tiny action that keeps the relationship alive. Every night, when the day ends, I sit down to write my diary from a single word that surfaced in conversations with my family. I take that word, bring it into @brnd, and turn it into my daily podium and reflection on /brand3 and the new generation of onchain brands. That loop—notice, capture, transform, share—is now part of my routine. It keeps me learning, forces me to stay current, and gives me a living, organic benchmark of how brands behave, evolve, and show up in people’s lives. Thinking about branding through routine works incredibly well for me. It stops being an abstract discipline and becomes something I practice a little bit every day, in public and in private. The miniapp is my canvas; my habits are the brushstrokes. And now I’m curious: what’s your routine, and what are your small daily tricks for becoming a better human while you build, use, and observe brands? 🥇Betrmint - @betrmint 🥈Minted Merch - @mintedmerch 🥉Inflynce - @inflynce

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Travel is one of the strongest metaphors for understanding branding. Some brands invite you on a *story journey*. Everything is part of an adventure: the lead‑up, the event, and the memories that stay afterward. Their narrative is temporal and seasonal, designed around cycles and milestones. Think of brands like FarCon: the brand is not just a logo on a poster, it’s the arc of preparation, the trip to the event, the encounters there, and the afterglow when you’re back home. The value is in the process as much as in the destination. These brands design their strategy as a sequence of “chapters” where every touchpoint moves you one step further along the journey. Other brands are *time machines*. They transport you instantly to another place, another era, or another emotional state. Poolsuite is a good example of this: from the first screen, you’re no longer simply “using a product”—you’re visiting a world. The brand is built as an immersive environment, full of references, aesthetics, and rituals that make you feel like you’ve stepped into a different timeline. Strategically, these brands win by owning a very specific mood and transporting users into it on demand. They don’t just solve a need; they stage an experience that feels like a trip every time you log in. Finally, there is the *practical journey*—brands that act like reliable luggage. They don’t need to be theatrical; they need to be there, always, and work without friction. A wallet like Rainbow, riding in your pocket on mobile, is exactly this type of brand: a companion that makes movement possible. Its job is to give you confidence as you move through chains, dapps, and experiences. Strategically, these brands focus on trust, reliability, and clarity. They become part of your essential kit, the thing you would never travel without. Thinking about branding through these three journeys helps clarify positioning: * Are you designing a narrative trip (like FarCon), where time, rhythm, and community rituals matter most? * Are you building a world‑jump (like Poolsuite), where the primary value is emotional transport and immersion? * Or are you crafting essential gear (like Rainbow), where your strength is being the dependable tool that makes every other journey possible? The most powerful onchain brands know which type of journey they are creating—and then design every element (product, visual language, token design, events, UX) to keep the traveler moving in that direction, again and again. 🥇Farcon - @farcon 🥈Poolsuite - @poolsuite 🥉Rainbow - @rainbow

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#14 — B3 Love* Building brands people never outgrow paragraph.com/@brand3/b3-love

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