For the past year a bunch of developers and blockchain enthusiasts have been working on something big - a plan to unfuck the internet. It has been known as Chromapolis, now we are reinventing and rebranding. It’s time to say hello to Chromia.
What’s in a name?
A year ago we came up with a plan to create a new kind of model for the internet, and we called it Chromapolis. The name combined our “color” identity with the Greek ideal of a polis, a city of politically engaged and empowered citizens. In time we realised that this concept was more restrictive than representative, more limiting than liberating. In some ways what we are building resembles a city, but in just as many others it does not. The streets and buildings and structure of the city hem in and confine an inherently digital environment with stiff and concrete metaphors. We aren’t really creating a community either, though we want to build one around our project. We want Chromia to be a great alternative to the stuff you already use and depend on. We don’t reinvent the wheel. We make the wheel easy to use.
We are Chromia
Who is Chromia? Well, we spent a *long* time thinking about the name. We wanted to stay connected to color, because it's part of our history. Our journey started in 2012 when Alex Mizrahi, our CTO, started his work with colored-coins. We’ve used color as a motif ever since.
We wanted our name to represent a space, and to have some meaning behind it as well. There is Chromia - a greek goddess of love, beauty and metals. In the Transformers universe she’s a brave, hard as nails soldier. Come on, this is great meaning! Okay, perhaps a bit of a stretch, but we like the balance Chromia provides between invoking concepts we love and value, and being abstract enough to leave space for future users to shape it and fill it with meaning.
This is important because this is an experimental project. We don’t have all the answers, and there’s a lot left to learn. As hardened cynics we don’t want to promise you utopia, but for sure we want to make a difference. As developers and security professionals we know that nothing is ever completely secure, but we want to use the best security principles available to give a little power back to the public. We want to create fairness and create a space where neither gender, nationality nor a bank account is determining your value, but where your own mind can do that for you. All you need to do is develop your ideas on the platform. We even made a cool programming language to make stuff easier and more consistent. Chromia is a name we can gather under for the rest of this journey.
Dress for the job you want
Of course we have been closely observing other companies working in blockchain, especially in public chains and dapp platforms. There is a very clear “blockchain aesthetic” out there, close to what we had done with Chromapolis. It became clear to us that we aren’t the same. Not because we are unique snowflakes, but because we don’t fit into dark hacker space, techy wow wow, Blade Runner inspired neon dreams.
We don’t take you to the future. We don’t hide behind complicated words to make you believe that we are smarter than you and you have to trust us just because. We are honest. Open-source to the core. Builders, not crypto-hustlers. We want to give our platform to the people. Make it public. Make it fair. Useful. Easy to understand and use.
For this reason, we have created a new aesthetic of dark soft blacks with warm pastel tinged shades of pink, yellow, orange, and yellow. Our new typeface is bold, defiantly different, and full of fun. Our body text focuses on readability across all platforms. Together, these elements imbue Chromia with the qualities we want our platform to have. Openness, innovation, supportiveness, and a human quality.
Shout out to Snask!
We’d like to thank Snask for guiding us through this process. An award winning creative agency based in Stockholm, they have a silly name but great ideas. Whenever we say “we designed…” or “we created…”, what we mean is that Snask did it and we loved it. We hope you enjoy the new Chromia they helped us bring to life.
We will be rolling out the new brand over the next few weeks. Stay tuned on all of our channels for newest news, funnest facts, and the hottest tech around.