If you haven't already, please read the proposal to rebrand Hive. You can find and vote to support the proposal here.
After about a day of voting, it's at 5.6 million HP in support. That's 11% of the return proposal, and 111 accounts have voted for it. Even if you don't have much HP, please lend your vote, every extra vote lends credibility to the proposal.
There's also a polemic supported by data that argues the case for rebranding.
Today I want to discuss what a rebrand could actually look like in practice. The way I see it, there is a spectrum of options. It starts from the Minimum Viable Rebrand, ends with the All-In Brand New Identity, and contains everything in between.
1. Minimum Viable Rebrand
The Minimum Viable Rebrand takes the lowest cost and lowest risk approach to a rebrand. The goal of the rebrand is nothing more than to solve the discoverability problem. There's nothing saying that we can't use a word that builds on what we have already.
If you search the term "Hive" you don't find us. But there's a wide space around the word Hive which are to varying degrees available or already taken. I like the idea of "HiveBits", where HIVE stays the ticker on exchanges but "HiveBits" becomes the token name. And then, if you search that, you land on us. Unfortunately, that one is taken. It seems that even the space around the word "Hive" can be crowded, but one example that already lands on us would be HiveChain (a portmanteau of Hive Blockchain). The search below was run with pws=0 (personalization off), gl=us (US region, neutral baseline), and hl=en (English).
A "Minimum Viable Rebrand" would just do enough to fix the discovery problem. We'll still need to do the work of creating the new brand, exchanges will need to update the name for it to work. Within the Hive space, we would also need to update the name as much as possible and especially on the larger sites, but if a few places still just call it "Hive", it's likely not a big deal.
Pros
- Lowest Cost.
- Lowest Risk.
- Likely to solve the discoverability problem (mostly).
Cons
- This rebrand is unlikely to generate much buzz in and of itself.
- Limited space around the word "Hive" that isn't also already occupied. As a result, it may be hard to make the new name fit and make sense in all contexts.
- It may not completely solve discoverability. Some percentage will still search the ticker "HIVE" instead of the full name, and still land on competitors. However, this doesn't appear to have been as much of an issue for other cryptos whose ticker is shorter than the token name and have more collisions as a result.
2. All-in Brand New Identity
Going "all in" on a brand new identity would mean the whole community embracing a completely invented brand. More than that, it would mean that the websites and apps embrace the brand, so that all or several of them are likely to be easily findable with a single search, in much the same way as Bitcoin.org, Bitcointalk, BitcoinMarket and Bitcoin Wallet were in the early days of Bitcoin.
Pros
- Certain to resolve discoverability problem
- An opportunity for a "reset" among the Hive community, a sense of an opportunity to "try again".
- More likely to generate buzz within the crypto space when a new token and ticker appears on the market
Cons
- Far more costly
- High risk (but possibly high reward)
- More likely to be divisive among the community
- More likely to leave apps behind
- Lost connection to older content which will still be indexed under Hive.blog or peakd.com
3. Something in Between
There's a whole space of possibilities within these two extremes. We can stick closer to Hive, or more into something new.
My own feeling, I would love to see the community do something big and embrace a completely new identity. I'd love to reestablish the excitement and optimism of the old days on this chain, and I think that's the more likely approach to achieve that. That said, ultimately the only thing that is crucial is to fix the discoverability problem. Hive has so much latent value that is being suppressed by complete non-discoverability. So for me, basically any rebrand will do, as long as it solves that.
