Akash Network
How to Build a Category-Defining Brand: From Technical Infrastructure to Global Phenomenon
Industry: Cloud Infrastructure, Decentralized Networks, Developer Tools, Hardware
Engagement: Brand Positioning & Storytelling, Visual Identity & Brand Assets
Timeline: Q1~Q2 2019
FOUNDATION FOR GROWTH
Defining the customer: From “build it and they will come” - to clear personas for both company and customer - Truth Cartel’s team set the stage for go-to-market.
Shaping the go-to-market story: Defining who Akash is, why it’s important NOW, and communicating the value propositions came down to our team and the CEO of Akash Network.
Designing a globally recognizable visual identity: Core to our sprint, Akash’s logo now appears through airport ads, billboards, its AKT token, and even custom hardware.
Built to sell: Akash Network’s final brand and go-to-market raised an additional $800,000 in funding within a year, repaying our efforts ~100 times over.
Truth Cartel architected the brand, messaging, and design foundations in Akash’s early days - for a protocol that has grown into the most respected name in decentralized compute.
The Challenge
Akash Network is production-ready supercloud that processes more than three million deployments per year, with an all-time high of $5M+ in quarterly compute spend in Q1 2026. Akash’s native token, AKT, was named a top-20 asset and it continues to set new highs in today’s AI boom.
Greg Osuri, CEO of Overclock Labs (creators of Akash Network) engaged Truth Cartel in 2019 - when Akash Network was little more than a promising GitHub repo with an initial round of seed funding.
The challenge was foundational. The technology - a permissionless data-sovereign peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplace connecting developers to market-priced idle compute - was real and exciting. But the digital presence and narrative on which to launch its native token was nowhere to be found.
With a major token sale planned for the next year, a small community of opinionated early adopters, the token fundraising window gradually closing, and institutional competition from Google and Amazon at our heels - the margin for error and timeline were both razor thin.
Our mandate: package the team, technology, and roadmap into a Web3-native brand ahead of a major private and public token offering - starting largely from scratch - quickly, while building on the enthusiasm of our existing community.
The Strategy
Truth Cartel led on two fronts - written communication and visual storytelling - by recruiting design experts from our practitioner network. Our brand acceleration process condensed identity, copy, logo, and design efforts into a 4-week sprint at a seed-stage budget, culminating in a major initial coin offering (ICO) that raised ~$1 million in fresh funding.
Truth Cartelled and delivered the engagement across two sequential phases - positioning first, assets second:
Phase 1: Brand Positioning: Truth Cartel ran three live discovery workshops with the Akash team to produce a complete brand positioning document covering mission, competitive positioning, target audience, values, and brand personality.
Phase 2: Visual Identity: A complete set of visual assets built on our positioning work - including a flexible logo system, color palette, typography, social channel banners, copy pull sheet, and brand guide.
Our branding work revolves around a series of core identity questions that shape any brand we work with - part literal, part stylistic:
Why do you need to exist? Why now?
What do you do and how do you accomplish it?
What differentiates you from your contemporaries?
For whom is the ecosystem built?
How does a user progress through the ecosystem, from awareness to advocacy?
For what values does the business stand, and how does it express them?
What is its long term mission, its ultimate vision of success?
Our live Phase 1 workshops gave both teams abundant collateral to jump into Phase 2, delivering a cohesive and flexible brand that stands toe-to-toe with Web3 contemporaries like Ethereum and institutional competition like Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services.
The Results
We defined archetypes, logos, and pathways that fall into three categories:
Technical: Framing our mission as a new paradigm - Akash’s architecture paving the way for an open and decentralized internet that powers global innovation.
Confrontational: Pitting Akash against the Goliaths of centralized compute monopolies, aiming to restore freedom to the builders.
Visionary: empowering a community of builders by supporting their Akash-powered innovations - ultimately as the path to both individual success and systemic change.
Combining technical pragmatism and visionary optimism, we set out to build the final brand assets, culminating in the following deliverables:
Brand guide covering visual and written storytelling across mission, product positioning, competitive framing, target audiences, brand values, and brand persona.
Competitive landscape map empowering Akash to compete in the big leagues of compute with a story suitable for institutional sales, retail traders, and venture investors.
Flexible logo system complete with variants for every possible use case including tessellated backgrounds, decks, print assets, and more - culminating in Akash hardware.
Brand color palette for digital and print, with Lead Red (#E30613) distinguishing Akash from every modern cloud and crypto-native competitor.
Typeface system built around PT Mono for headlines and Source Sans Pro for body, compatible with a developer audience without being cold.
Social assets across Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and beyond, delivering a cohesive visual aesthetic and brand narrative that punches above its class.
Copy pull sheet to standardize Akash’s message for journalists, token buyers, and search engines as it moved into its critical go-to-market and ICO phase.
Akash Network would later raise $800,000 in October 2020 at an ICO price of ~$0.04, winning major exchange listings and media coverage, and hitting an all time high of >$7.00 within 6 months. AKT remains a top-200 token and a leading Web3 compute provider today - especially for AI use cases like large language model (LLM) training.
Akash's founding team focused on building the protocol. Truth Cartel led and delivered the brand that would carry it to market - from the mission statement to the logo file.
→ Nail storytelling. Close funding.
Why Truth Cartel
All-in-One shop handling strategy, branding, narrative, and go-to-market. We co-develop the brand and bring it to market, from logo to global phenomenon. Our expert network adds design and development under a single banner.
Rapid strategy and execution at a competitive price for companies at nearly any stage. We hit Web3’s then-closing ICO window with a polished brand that competes directly against enterprise Goliaths like Amazon and Google.
Timeless and flexible design that stayed resilient through pivots in the dead of crypto winter, reclaimed the hype of today’s AI boom, and scaled across digital, print, and hardware.
