Crypto Asset Manager Grayscale Investments Unveils New Brand Identity

Grayscale Investments, the world’s largest crypto asset manager, is unveiling a new brand identity that reflects the firm’s decade-long evolution, as well as its future-forward commitment to investors.

Created by IPG creative company Elephant, the rebrand coincides with the 10th anniversary of both the firm and its flagship fund, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (BTC). Grayscale’s business was built embracing US financial rules and regulations, underpinned by one fundamental belief: investors deserve transparent, regulated access to crypto. Since 2013, Grayscale has spearheaded digital asset investing and is proud to have grown GBTC into the world’s largest Bitcoin investment vehicle.

Elephant partnered with Grayscale to reimagine their brand as the modern asset manager, including a new vision, strategy, and ways of communicating its legacy and expertise with investors.

"In an industry that evolves as quickly as crypto, we are focused on ensuring that our company and our brand is recognizable and lasting,” said Seres Lu, Grayscale VP marketing. “As Grayscale celebrates our 10th birthday, we have an enormous amount of pride in what we have already built, but in many ways feel like we're just beginning to fulfil our ambitions. We feel that our new branding, designed in collaboration with Elephant, better represents who we are today, and has the ability to scale with us into the future."

Elephant set out to define a truly ownable brand for Grayscale, one that celebrates Grayscale’s core values of expertise and transformation while standing out among newer crypto brands and traditional financial institutions.

“Our approach was to bring the principles of atomic product design to a brand system. We created brand design components that are flexible and interchangeable to allow the brand and communication to easily and quickly flex at the speed of finance,” said Chris Hayes, VP product design at Elephant.

Elephant articulated the brand vision as 'creating a share of the future for everyone' – rising above the dark web of crypto companies and the stale exclusivity of other asset management firms. They brought this strategic vision to life through the following elements:

• The new Grayscale wordmark, rooted in strength and modernism, reflects the brand’s industry leading position. Negative spaces inside the letters create forward motion, signifying that Grayscale propels the industry and their investors forward.
• A unique and flexible colour system, grounded in the world of finance while being as distinct and agile as Grayscale is as a company.
• Graphical elements that are integral to and ownable by the brand. The 'G' represents Grayscale the company, the 'ticker' represents Grayscale’s place in the economy and the 'shares' represent shares of the future for its investors.
• A new verbal identity and tone of voice that is modern and forward-facing, abandoning both the stiffness of the traditional financial institutions and the platitudes of crypto start-ups.

Chris continued, “We ultimately codified this identity into a highly flexible brand platform that expresses the company’s new vision and creates consistency across applications and touchpoints to reinforce the distinctiveness of the brand.”