Meridian: Where Popcorn Brain’s Visions Turn to Validation

Is this a dream? Are those tears my eyes are battling? Am I about to cry…at a hackathon? 

Unless you’re a developer, you probably wouldn’t expect to find yourself at a hackathon, let alone get emotional at one. But here we were in London, fighting tears at a hackathon hosted by our beloved client, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF).

We had originally booked for London to attend SDF’s annual Meridian conference, but they invited us to come a few days early to photograph the hackathon beforehand. The moment we walked into the venue, we realized this was no ordinary crypto hackathon…a sausage fest of college bros. No, every person imaginable was in the room. There were gymnasts from Eastern Europe, punk rock stars from West Africa, wiz kids from India, and spelunkers from Mexico’s mountains. There were expert developers and classic finance guys, but there also were humanitarian aid workers, newbies who had never written a line of code in their lives, and grey-bearded dudes looking for a meaningful new challenge. 

Witnessing this was a pinch-me moment for our team, a living confirmation that Popcorn Brain’s rebrand of the Stellar network has transformed into a success story. The brand was doing what we intended for it to do: to move far beyond the typical crypto crowds and attract waves of new, well-intentioned audiences from all over the world. 

When we pitched to rebrand the Stellar network two years ago, the brand struggled to stay relevant in the public eye among growing skepticism towards crypto. Money-hungry fraudsters like Sam Bankman-Fried were stealing the spotlight, and the industry itself had become a meme. In short, Stellar wasn’t known to the people who needed to know about it. 

It didn’t help that the brand shared the same colors as nearly every player in the industry: black and dark purple. With visual metaphors like rocket ships and constellations, the brand itself looked more like a PC gaming company than a nonprofit fighting to help the world’s underserved populations.

Flash forward two years since our winning pitch to SDF and suddenly we found ourselves in a beautiful venue full of fascinating characters expressing love for the new brand, all of whom were there to help build a better global financial system, one where money is borderless and where no one is without access to essential financial services. And to make matters more beautiful for us, so many of these ‘hackers’ were referencing – without knowing who we were – the Stellar content Popcorn Brain had made as inspiration for attending the hackathon.

So what did we actually do to reinvent the Stellar brand? How did it go from something that resembled SpaceX to something that radiates humanity and helpfulness?

Right off the bat we changed the brand color 180 degrees to a highly-visible generous gold (you need to be visible to be helpful), switched the typography to reflect the baked-in trustworthiness of traditional newspapers, and embraced inspiring street art…rather than pump AI bullshit into the metaverse. We started removing the jargon from all their communication, introduced a new way of speaking that is more layman, worked on a new website that is truly intuitive/self-explanatory, introduced physical branding elements that you can truly feel, published Stellar content in big publications like the New York Times, crafted a unique sonic identity that encapsulates Stellar’s connection between technology and humanity and replaced the visual imagery with real photos/films that capture the real lives of developers building on the Stellar network.

Along the way, we traveled around the world to tell these inspiring stories happening on the network. We’ve embedded ourselves in a formally cartel-controlled town in Colombia to tell the story of a cash-only community embracing crypto for purposes of safety and continued filming during historic storms in South Africa to finish off the brand film with Idris Elba. We’ve gone to Geneva to investigate how the world of humanitarian aid operates and followed real developers in the US, Africa, and Latin America to show how they are solving local problems through Stellar. 

The whole Stellar rebrand has been an international labor of love for Popcorn Brain, but it hasn’t always been easy either. Our team has pushed itself to the limit in the process. We’ve argued with each other, fought, kicked, screamed, gone numb, burnt out, and laughed hysterically at times when deadlines seemed impossible to make. And along the way, we could only pray that all that effort was going to be worth the while.

For any creative agency, the rebrand is the Bowser-level challenge, a million-piece jigsaw where each tiny aspect must be considered in painstaking detail. The ultimate dream is for all those puzzle pieces to come together in cohesive harmony and play sweet melodies on the heartstrings of the target audience, but this is just a dream. Rebrands fail all the time, and unlike a one-off marketing campaign, there is no instant feedback to tell you whether a rebrand was truly a success or not. These things take a while to marinate; only time will tell.

That’s why being in London for the hackathon and the annual Meridian conference that followed, was such a precious time for our team. It’s been a year since the new brand officially launched and we could see with our own eyes that Stellar is thriving. As we walked around the venue where this 36-hour competition was being held to see who could build the most impactful solution on Stellar, we marveled at how all the brand assets – from the merch to the wayfinding signs – came together to make the space cool and accessible. 

This wasn’t a sterile room of 0s and 1s. This was a vibrant mosaic of people from all over. And while the hackers worked 'round the clock, one of London’s edgiest upcoming artists, DaHexd, was matching that energy in the corner, using EEG brain scans as inspiration to create paintings we’d love to buy. For the hackers who needed a break, they could waltz over to that corner and take inspiration from an entirely different art form. We watched these scenes unfold with a smile on our faces, SDF had become the lifestyle brand we envisioned.

Attending Stellar’s Meridian conference in Westminster in the days after the hackathon felt once more like stepping in a warm bath of creative fulfillment. Not an hour would pass without us hearing the best reviews about the new Stellar brand. One Chilean who has been building on Stellar for a decade now told us that the launch of the Stellar rebrand was like ‘God himself coming down bearing gifts.’ Another dev told us ‘Everything changed for the better when Stellar became yellow.’  Music to our ears.

We know we're self-indulging here, but sometimes you must take a moment to enjoy the fruits of your labor. If anything, to remind yourself that all the effort was worth it… all those arguments over creative briefs and sleepless nights and headaches from caffeine overloads were worth the struggle. 

Admittedly, it helps when you truly believe in the brand you work for and that’s the case for us with SDF. We don’t have to scrape the barrel in search of a last droplet of motivation when it comes to SDF because we believe the world needs a financial system that isn’t built on exploitation and injustice. We know that if we do our job well, then SDF will be able to do their job well. If you can find yourself a client that motivates you like this, then take our advice: work your ass off, and

SDF – if you’re reading this – thank you for being the best client an agency can dream of. Your trust in us is worth gold and our time with you in London was bloody brilliant as always. And the beautiful thing is we’re just getting started.