Whether you want to assess investment potential or the innovations themselves, there are countless resources online for evaluating the thousands of crypto projects out there.
This is not that.
Welcome to Blockchain Brands, a series dedicated to design excellence.
This shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement of or comment on the project or technology itself. Each post is simply a spotlight on a brand in the crypto space that I think deserves recognition for outstanding brand identity and user experience design.
Today’s Blockchain Brand: Cardano
It wasn’t Cardano’s clean aesthetic that first got my attention. And even though I really love mythology, neither was it their Greco naming protocols. The logo for their proof of stake algo, Ourobouros, is an allusion to eternity symbolised by the serpent eating its own tail.
Their wallet, Daedalus, is named after the father of Icarus, and its logo draws on the same Greek myth. Daedalus built a labyrinth for King Minos, who needed it to imprison his wife's son, the Minotaur. According to Ovid in Metamorphoses, Daedalus built it so well he couldn't find his way out. It's the ancient world's version of making your password so secure you can never remember it.
What got my attention to begin with was the mesmerising and addictive User Interface over at iohk.io (Cardano’s parent organisation). Head over there and mouse around. You won't regret it.
IOHK lists a sizeable creative team based all around the world, led by creative director Richard Wild.
Richard Wild is a creative professional with over 10+ years experience in the design industry. Richard has worked for BSkyB and was part of the creative leadership of the ethereum launch.
He manages the design team for IOHK out of London, and gives creative direction to the brand for IOHK.
I’m personally extremely excited about the future of Cardano. Here’s hoping their tale is a Promethean one filled with the heroism and victory.
ABOUT IOHK
Founded in 2015 by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood, IOHK is a technology company committed to using peer-to-peer innovations to provide financial services to the three billion people who don't have them.
They are an engineering company that builds cryptocurrency and blockchains for academic institutions, government entities and corporations. They are a decentralised company that loves small, innovative teams forming and executing ideas that can cause cascading disruption.
Cascading disruption is IOHK's founding principle. It is the idea that most of the structures that form the world's financial, governance and social systems are inherently unstable and thus minor perturbations can cause a ripple effect that fundamentally reconfigures the entire system. IOHK is committed to identifying and developing technology to force these perturbations in order to push towards a more fair and transparent order.
ABOUT CARDANO
Cardano is a distributed computing platform that runs the blockchain for the Ada cryptocurrency. Daedalus is currently the only (software) cryptocurrency wallet that holds Ada and allows transfers to other wallet addresses.
It was created by blockchain development firm Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) and led by Charles Hoskinson, former co-founder of BitShares, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, and aims to run smart contracts, decentralized applications, side chains, multi-party computation, and metadata.