Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher
In the traditional business world, brand equity is the lifeline of an enterprise. Frequent name changes are almost equivalent to actively destroying one's competitive moat.
NVIDIA doesn't change its name every few years, Apple doesn't abandon Apple due to a business transformation, and Nike doesn't start over with its brand because of a market downturn.
However, in the world of cryptocurrency, the rules are often the opposite. According to statistics from RootData, over 16% of crypto projects have changed their names, and many well-known projects also experience considerable name changes.
Just yesterday, the on-chain IP ecosystem Story Protocol announced it would change its name to DATA, and the IP tokens will migrate to new DATA tokens at a 1:1 ratio. In the past few months, Xion changed to Verona, Matrixport changed to BIT, and the TON token symbol changed to GRAM. Even earlier, a number of well-known projects like Klaytn, EOS, Fantom, MakerDAO, Elrond, and Matic Network have changed their names.
More extreme projects have changed their names more than once. For example, MAITRIX has previously gone by CENTRAL, X Network, and XLD Finance; BitSafe was formerly known as dlcBTC and DLC.Link; TaleX used to be called Read2N and Metale Protocol; KGeN used to be indiGG and Kratos Gaming Network. The more the names change, the less they seem to gain new life; instead, most projects gradually fall into silence.
This leads to a question rarely discussed seriously in the crypto industry: Why do crypto projects love to change names?
The answer may not be complex: in the crypto industry, brand is not the most important asset; attention, narrative, token price, and liquidity are.
1. Crypto Brand Loyalty is Too Low
Traditional brands fear changing their names because user loyalty comes from long-term consumption experiences. A user who has bought iPhones for years, drank Starbucks for years, and worn Nike for years, doesn't form their perception of the brand in a day, nor will it easily change due to a marketing campaign.
However, the user structure of crypto projects is entirely different.
Most early users are not traditional consumers but rather investors, airdrop hunters, liquidity providers, node participants, and narrative traders. They use products not necessarily because they are useful, but because there may be airdrops, potential earnings, or price increases.
This means that user loyalty to crypto brands is inherently weak.
In traditional industries, users ask, “Is this brand trustworthy?” In the crypto industry, users more often ask, “Can this token still rise?” As long as prices remain depressed over the long term, narratives fail, and ecosystems go silent, old names can become negative assets.
A name that has experienced a crash, being locked up, hacker attacks, team disputes, or route failures is hard to inspire market imagination again. What it bears is not brand equity, but K-line scars and community grievances.
This is also the fundamental reason why crypto projects dare to frequently change names: in many cases, the old name has no competitive moat, only a historical burden.
2. Name Change as a Marketing Strategy
Not all name changes should be simply viewed as "rebranding." Some projects change names because the original name cannot support the new strategic scope; as market hot concepts change, if the name contains outdated concepts like “Social” or “DAO” or if the name doesn't fit the new meaning, changing the name becomes a necessary choice.
For example, the decentralized social protocol OpenSocial changed its name to Eden after transitioning to AI; the decentralized electronic signature platform EthSign chose to drop "Eth" from its name after expanding its business; and the Ethereum sidechain Matic Network rebranded to Polygon (which means polygon) after creating multiple scaling solutions.
When a project's business boundaries change fundamentally, the existing brand may limit external perceptions. At this time, changing the name is a necessary strategic calibration.
Of course, there are also many projects that actively "ride the wave," gaining more attention by incorporating popular concepts into their names. During the previous wave of metaverse hype, Elrond changed its name to MultiversX, directly incorporating “Multiverse” elements into its name, clearly hoping to ride the metaverse and multidimensional digital world narrative.
Similarly, with AI, RWA, and Perp becoming industry hotspots, many projects quickly rename themselves to align with new concepts. For instance, Vanilla Finance renamed itself Superp, and Function X became Pundi AI, reshaping their narratives.
After all, in the crypto industry, the narrative itself is part of asset pricing. The closer a name is to the new narrative, the easier it is for exchanges, KOLs, retail investors, and market-making funds to take notice again.
Many projects change names because the core reason is that the old brand has fallen into a trust abyss.
Historically, in the crypto industry, hacker attacks, contract vulnerabilities, stolen cross-chain bridges, team controversies can quickly destroy a project's brand credibility. Once users associate a name with “being hacked,” “explosion,” “running away,” and “poor compensation,” continuing to use the old name means carrying negative public opinion continuously.
Therefore, changing names becomes the most direct public relations tool for projects, euphemistically referred to as "brand rebuilding."
Anyswap changed its name to Multichain after being hacked, and Alpha Finance changed its name to Stella after losing $37 million, both carrying similar connotations. On the surface, they are adjusting product lines and strategic positioning; however, from the market’s perception, the name change also serves to “cut old memories” to some extent.
3. The Gray Area of Name and Token Changes
If it’s just a name change, the impact is actually limited. What truly deserves vigilance is that many crypto projects often accompany name changes with token changes.
Changing tokens means that the old token needs to migrate to a new token, exchanges will issue announcements, deposits and withdrawals will be paused, old trading pairs will be delisted, and new trading pairs will go live. For project teams, this is a rare opportunity for a secondary listing.
Many projects will also carry out token splits. For example, 1:100, 1:1000, splitting originally high-priced tokens into more quantities, making single tokens appear cheaper. Projects like SKY, BEAM, among others, have used similar strategies. A split does not change the value of the company; lower unit prices often attract more retail attention.
More critically, after changing names and tokens, the historical K-lines of exchanges are often reset.
For many old tokens, the historical burden is heavy. Years of being locked up, downtrends, negative news, and resistance levels are all embedded in the old K-lines. When the new token is launched, it seemingly has a brand new chart with no historical peak pressure, no long-term downtrend shadow, and no intuitive locked positions.
This is extremely advantageous for project teams and market makers. When the old token transitions to the new token, many exchanges will pause deposits and withdrawals. At this time, the actual circulating market may become very light. On a few open trading platforms, market-making funds may only need relatively minimal capital to drive up the price of the new token, creating the market illusion of "surging post-upgrade."
Subsequently, project teams, early participants, or market-making funds may take advantage of the liquidity recovery and user enthusiasm to offload their holdings.
This is the most dangerous aspect of changing names and tokens: it appears to be a brand upgrade, but in essence, it may be a liquidity reset.
Further, many projects will also redesign the token economics during the token swap process. Ordinary users see a 1:1 migration, thinking their rights are unaffected. However, the project team may simultaneously introduce new validator rewards, ecological funds, team incentives, node subsidies, and strategic reserves, thereby creating a large number of new tokens out of thin air.
FRONT changed its name to Self Chain, and TVK rebranded to Vanar Chain, are typical cases. They both significantly increased token issuance under the pretext of node rewards, ecological construction, etc., diluting the holding value for users.
4. The Real Problem is Not the Name Change, but the Avoidance of History
Crypto projects can certainly change their names; this is not a serious issue.
Changes in technical routes, expansions of product boundaries, shifts in market hotspots, and legal risk separations can all lead to reasonable brand rebranding. Cases like Matic changing to Polygon demonstrate that a good name can indeed help a project inherit a larger strategic space.
However, in many more cases, the name changes of crypto projects are not meant to solidify the brand but rather to escape it.
Escape from old K-lines, from locked positions, from hacker attacks, from failed narratives, from user doubts, and from stories that can no longer be told.
This is precisely the biggest difference between the crypto industry and the traditional business world: traditional companies fear losing brand memory, while many crypto projects fear users remembering too much.
Therefore, when a project announces a name change, the market should not only ask what its new name is but should also inquire about three questions:
What real capabilities or strategies has it added? Has its token economics changed? What old history does it most want users to forget?
If there are real products, real income, real users, and clearer strategies behind the name change, then it may mark the beginning of a new phase. But if the name change is merely accompanied by a token swap, trendy chasing, excessive issuance, and clearing the K-lines, then it is very likely just a beautifully packaged version of an old game.
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