Years ago I spent two days in a conference room with a whiteboard that read TRUST, SECURE, VAULT, ANCHOR, SOLID in somebody's handwriting. The client wanted a name that felt safe. We were naming a checking account.
I thought about that whiteboard all weekend, watching a thing called a stablecoin go to roughly nothing.
TerraUSD was engineered to hold at one dollar. Since Monday it has not held at one dollar, and Luna, the token propping it up, has fallen far enough that the charts have run out of useful axis. Billions of dollars, gone in about the span of a normal week.
I have no crypto opinions worth publishing. I have a naming opinion.
Stable is not a name, it is a claim, and a claim inside your name is a promise you have to keep every day or the name becomes the evidence against you.
Naming is the part of brand work everyone treats as the easy part. It is the fun meeting. Sticky notes, snacks, someone says a word that sounds expensive in a European accent. Then the name goes on the thing and does load bearing work forever, in every headline, including the ones nobody planned for.
There are two kinds of names. Names that describe a feeling and names that make a testable assertion. Oatly is the first kind. Liquid Death is the first kind, gloriously. Neither one can be proven false by a bad Tuesday.
Stablecoin is the second kind. So is anything carrying Trust, Guarantee, Forever, or Sure. You are handing every customer and every reporter a yardstick and telling them exactly where to hold it.
Here is the part that gets lost. The name did the marketing. Nobody had to explain the category, because the word was the whole pitch, which is why money moved into it as fast as it did. Names that promise cash in the promise up front and borrow against it, and the loan comes due the first time reality disagrees.
You are handing every customer and every reporter a yardstick and telling them exactly where to hold it.
None of this is really a crypto lesson. Banks learned it. Airlines learned it. Every category with Premium in a product tier is learning it slowly. If your name asserts something, build the operation that makes the assertion true before you print it on anything, and if you cannot, pick a name that describes who you are instead of what you swear will never happen.
Karaoke Tuesday, the host called me baby and put me down for Landslide, which is a song about the ground giving way. I sang it badly and with total commitment. In my defense, I have never claimed otherwise. The only name on that sign was mine.