This proposal is expected to appear on Snapshot for voting on 2021-10-31T13:00:00Z . Make sure to stake your vBNT for voting before this date and time to participate in the DAO decision.
Proposal: Heat check - Rebrand Bancor as a part of v3’s marketing efforts
Vote FOR: Supports follow-on individual proposals that will address a possible new name, logo, website domains, imagery, and other branding
Vote AGAINST: Do not support any follow-up proposals to address the issues stated
TL;DR
- Despite Bancor being a trailblazer in the decentralized application domain, Bancor’s user sentiment and market awareness greatly trails other similar protocols
- Bancor continues to have a poor reputation in the crypto space
- Bancor has poor market awareness
- Bancor has an ambiguous logo
- Bancor is not a common word, and is hard to share with others
- Bancor is not memeable
- Brainstorm some possible alternatives
Despite Bancor being a trailblazer in the decentralized application domain, Bancor’s user sentiment and market awareness greatly trails other similar protocols. This is especially disappointing given Bancor’s unique value proposition, unique and novel features, and technically superior product. The DAO understands that marketing effects will ramp up around the v3 release, but this proposal seeks to inquire from the community if greater change to the Bancor brand is desired.
A vote FOR does not mean we vote to change the name or various branding aspects unconditionally, but rather follow-on individual proposals will be made at a later time to further refine what the DAO desires.
Bancor continues to have a poor reputation relative to other projects in the crypto space:
While no user surveys have been completed as part of this proposal, it is no great secret that many in the crypto community outside of BNT holders do not see Bancor in a positive light. Much of this negative sentiment may stem from the 2017 ICO, when the token first went for sale (and many saw this as a quick money grab, especially after the token price dumped later on). Despite Bancor’s initial DEX product being quite novel and revolutionary in the blockchain space, it did not see great consumer adoption (this is more likely due to the nascent nature of DeFi at the time). Many BNT holders felt like they had made a very poor investment, and despite Bancor’s best efforts since then, it is hard to shake such a negative sentiment.
Searching for Bancor on google provides some limited info, but apart from that most of the news articles you will find have negative sentiment:
Bancor has poor market awareness:
Bancor, relative to other DEX products, is not well known.
A simple google search backs this up: most of the products mentioned are uniswap, sushiswap or the like:
This is backed up by on-chain data, which shows that Bancor is more or less not a well known product to trade on.
Bancor has an ambiguous logo:
This post clearly illustrates the issue. If after 4 years, users are still unsure what the logo is or stands for, it is too ambiguous to be a good logo.
Bancor is not a common word, and is hard to share with others:
This conversation has played out more than once when I try to tell others about Bancor:
“It’s called Bancor, maybe check it out.”
“Banker”?
“No, ‘Bank-or’ !”
“Bang core”?
"No, “B-A-N-C-O-R!”
“Oh, ok, I’ll try and find that later.”
Narrator: They won’t.
Bancor is not a common word in the English language. From the time of the Bretton Woods conference until the 2017 ICO it was not used much. It makes sense that its not in common vernacular. It is somewhat hard to pronounce and as such is not easy to share with others. This point is related to the next one -
Bancor branding is not memeable:
Memes are how crypto twitter shares ideas, and the current Bancor branding* is not easily memeable.
The word Bancor itself is not easily memeable. The logo and brand imagery are mostly* bland and boring.
Comparing to other successfully branded projects, like Uniswap, Sushiswap, Trader/Banker Joe, Olympus (3, 3), etc., Bancor is way behind.
*Bancor Vortex messaging and branding was memeable and spread well, and had a high impression rate
Brainstorm some possible alternatives:
Naming:
B
It’s simple, easy to meme, (B), I staked on B, etc.
http://b.finance
BancorSwap
This has been tried before but did not stick well, its also not that easy to meme
Banc
It’s simple, easier to meme, similar to “Bank” which provides some similar services, “I staked on (Banc)”, etc.
http://banc.or
So how do we fix it? I don’t know - I’m not a professional marketer. This post merely seeks to inquire if the community agrees that Bancor has a branding and awareness problem. I hope that this post can help start a greater discussion around this area and build some ideas together.