Rebuilding our brand

When we started Akord back in 2020, it was with a clear focus on protecting privacy and empowering data ownership. We didn’t know about Arweave back then.

In 2021, we discovered the Weave, the Permaweb and joined the Open Web Foundry.

We realised permanence had been the missing ingredient. Many possibilities were opening up. The ideas faucet had been turned all the way to the right.

We presented a use case at OWF focused on digital heritage – Akord vaults could be a time capsule for your family.

But this was really only one of many possible directions we saw. Over time, we realised we were drowning in ideas, lacking a clear focus. 

Rebuilding the brand

We knew we needed to rebuild the brand, to start again with fresh eyes. 

For us, this wasn't about having something that just looked cool, we needed our brand to help position us, to understand who we wanted to talk to, and how; and to be built on meaningful, powerful ideas that would be translated in all our visual imagery and messaging. 

Before we could get there, a few of the questions we wanted to tackle were:

• How do people, within or new to web3, perceive Arweave and this permanent storage paradigm?

• Will Akord have more value and appeal now for business and organisations or individual users?

• What are the best use cases for Akord?

• How do we bring together the app, the API and developer tools under a coherent message?

So since February we’ve been working with brand consultancy GoodLove to answer these questions and many more.

The work has included 9 decks and reports (~250pp), 7 workshops (~11h), a dozen research group interviews (~15h), and well over 200 artboards of UX wireframes and UI design.

A protocol for secure storage and publishing

While our bread and butter, so to speak, is secure storage on Arweave, we're now also working on evolving Akord within a Permaweb publishing context. 

We've seen businesses like veritree talk of publishing their planting site data to Arweave with Akord, new projects like Forever Stories using our vaults to publish creative content permanently, and organisations like Mahamati Foundation publishing ancient teachings to the Permaweb as a way to preserve knowledge. 

Akord Explorer, to be released in the first half of 2023, will further unlock the potential for our vaults for publishing and sharing on the Permaweb.

The storage of data within vaults was just the beginning. We've always been working with a view to the way in which we publish data to Arweave; whether that's within a secure collaborative context, or now increasingly as we look to new ways to present, share and discover valuable data.

Prepare to seize control, prepare to build

This new look Akord is now also speaking to the builders. The people looking to leverage the foundation of web3 – data ownership – to build their own exciting visions of future.

We have a principles first approach to our work, and we've seen how this has attracted builders with similar values. Whether it’s Genobank and FMD working with Akord to secure medical data through NFTs, or an individual developer using Akord-JS to build privacy and permanence into their app, we'll be empowering builders with the tools they need to build a better future using the Akord protocol.