Bitcoin hit $64,000 in April. Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency literally created as a joke in 2013, reached a market cap of $80 billion because Elon Musk kept tweeting about it. Coinbase went public at a $86 billion valuation. My neighbor in Portland, who I am fairly sure does not fully understand what a blockchain is, told me over the fence last week that he is "really into DeFi now."
I do not want to write about whether crypto is a good investment. I want to write about what crypto's brand strategy tells us about where consumer trust is moving.
Lululemon's ambassador program doesn't pay athletes millions. It empowers local fitness instructors. The brand is built from the yoga studio floor up, not the broadcast booth down.
Traditional financial brands are built on trust in institutions. You trust your bank because it is old, regulated, insured, and has a building with marble columns. The brand signals are: stability, expertise, authority, permanence. JPMorgan has been around since 1799. That longevity IS the brand.
The brand signals are: stability, expertise, authority, permanence.
Crypto's entire brand proposition is the opposite: you do not need to trust institutions because the code handles it. Trust is distributed across a decentralized network rather than concentrated in a single institution. The marketing is not "trust us." The marketing is "you do not have to trust anyone."
Distrust is the brand. That is wild.
And it is resonating because institutional trust has been declining for twenty years. Trust in banks cratered after 2008. Trust in government is at historic lows. Trust in media, in experts, in authority figures of any kind is diminishing. Into that void steps crypto with a value proposition perfectly calibrated for a low-trust era: what if you did not have to trust anyone at all?
For traditional brands, this is a strategic challenge that goes beyond crypto. The old brand playbook assumed that consumer trust was built through authority signals: expertise, heritage, scale, endorsement. But if consumers increasingly distrust authority itself, those signals become liabilities rather than assets.
Look at how Coinbase marketed itself ahead of its IPO. Not "trust us with your money." Instead: "we make it easy to access the decentralized financial system." They positioned as a bridge, not an authority. A tool, not a fiduciary. That is a subtle but important distinction in a market where institutional authority is the thing people are trying to escape.
I think this trust inversion is going to reshape brand strategy far beyond financial services. We are already seeing it in media (Substack over institutions), in education (bootcamps over universities), in retail (community-validated products over expert-endorsed ones). The pattern is consistent: peer trust is rising while institutional trust is falling.
Brands that still lead with "trust our expertise" might need to pivot to "trust the system we built" or "trust the community around us" or even "you do not have to trust us, here is the proof."
The era of institutional brand authority is not over. But its monopoly is. And the brands that figure out how to build trust in a low-trust world will define the next decade.
Now excuse me while I go explain to my neighbor that DeFi stands for decentralized finance and not, as he seems to believe, some kind of high-yield savings account.