A New Era: The Rebranding to DeHub
By DeHub Team — 2021-07-01
We rebranded to DeHub in Q3 2021.
Renames in this industry are usually a bad sign — a project changing its name after a failed launch, or chasing whichever narrative is paying that quarter. Ours was neither, but it is fair to be suspicious of the category, so it is worth being specific about what changed and why.
The name was describing the wrong thing
Our original identity was built around the token and the moment it launched. That was accurate for about six months. By mid-2021 we had a beta app with a few thousand daily users, a community that had voted on the token's fundamentals, an arcade in planning, and streaming work already underway.
None of that fits under a name that points at a token. Every conversation started in the wrong place: people arrived expecting a coin with a chart and had to be walked backwards into the fact that there was a product. When your own name is costing you the first two minutes of every introduction, the name is the problem.
What "hub" was meant to commit us to
The word was chosen as a constraint rather than a description. A hub is a place other things connect into. Picking it publicly meant committing to a platform that would carry streaming, an arcade, a marketplace, a feed and payments — rather than a single app that would spend the next three years adding features nobody asked for.
That commitment turned out to be expensive in the way we hoped. It ruled things out. Several profitable-looking detours over the following years were declined on the basis that they did not connect to anything, and the name is a large part of why that argument kept winning.
What it cost
Rebrands are not free, and this one landed in a quarter that was already full:
- Every piece of published material, social handle and store listing had to be redone.
- Search history and prior coverage stayed attached to the old name for a long time afterwards.
- Some early community members had genuine attachment to the original identity, and a rename reads as a loss of history whatever the reasoning.
We did it anyway, and in the same quarter we started the full app rebuild in React Native. The two were the same decision made in two places — one about what to call the thing, one about what to build it on, both about stopping being a token with an app attached.
Looking back
The rebrand is four years old now and DeHub has been through a v1 vulnerability, a v2 relaunch, a fraudulent listing agent and a real estate venture that did not survive contact with a regulator. The name has outlasted all of it, largely because it was chosen to describe an ambition rather than a market condition. That is the only kind of rebrand worth the disruption.
The test we apply now
Any name, product or positioning decision at DeHub has to answer one question: would this still be the right choice if the market conditions that make it attractive today reversed entirely?
A name chosen because a narrative is paying fails that test immediately. So do most feature decisions made in a bull market, and a fair number of the partnerships offered to us over the years.
It is a slower way to decide things and it has cost us some opportunities that would have worked out. It has also meant that four years of extremely varied market conditions have not once made us want to be called something else, which for a project of this age in this industry is not the default outcome.