Rebranding yAcademy

Proposal Summary

Currently, yAcademy encompasses three main areas: fellowships, smart-contract auditing, and zero-knowledge auditing. This proposal asks whether a new name for yAcademy and its arms (yAudit, zAudit) is a good idea. If the answer is yes for partial or full rebranding, a discussion will be had on a potential new name(s) over two weeks on Discord. Subsequently, the community will have an informal vote on Discord on all proposed names, followed by a formal snapshot vote on the top 3-5 names from the informal vote.

Proposal Background

yAcademy now has two facets: a public-good fellowship program and two professional audit arms focused on smart contracts and zero-knowledge, respectively. Currently, we have three brands: yAcademy, yAudit, and zAudit. yAcademy and yAudit have respective websites, report repos, and social media accounts. The zAudit arm is just starting up and would have to bootstrap its online presence similarly to yAudit.

This proposal touches on two issues:

1. The value of rebranding: Is it wise to have a new name(s) to reflect our growth and solidify our identity as an independent entity?
2. Rebranding strategy: Should we rebrand yAcademy only, have a separate brand for each arm, or have one unified brand for all and leave the “arm” concept internal?

There has been an ongoing discussion on the need and benefits of rebranding at this stage, including signaling our growth, solidifying the status of our DAO as an independent entity, streamlining and focusing our communications, and simplifying the curation and publishing of our output (reports, research, and blog posts, blocks’ output).

Proposal Details

This proposal presents four options:

Option A: Rebrand yAcademy only
We keep the yAudit and zAudit brands as is and pick a new brand name for yAcademy only. Each of the three arms would still maintain its respective sites, report repos, and social media accounts. One blog is maintained under the yAcademy site.

Pros:

• Avoid funding blockers from confusion around yAcademy being a funded subDao of yearn.
• Signal our evolution and incredible growth.
• Avoid the reductive “academy” in the name.
• Raise awareness of the entity.

Cons:

• The overhead of maintaining three separate brands: 3 separate sites, 3 separate social media accounts, 3 separate audit repos.
• Fragmented impact: Someone stumbling upon yAudit may not be aware that we can also do ZK audits and vice versa.
• Client communication overhead: For a ZK auditing client having a smart contract component, we need to explain every time that we also have residents who can take on the smart contract component.

Option B: No rebranding
This means we keep the current brand names: yAcademy, yAudit, and zAudit. As in Option A, each of the three would continue maintaining its own site, report repos, and social media accounts. One blog is maintained under the yAcademy site.

Pros:

• The yAcademy and yAudit brands have been around for a while, so we don’t risk losing the brand weight if someone isn’t aware of the rebranding.
• We keep the status quo.

Cons:

• We get all the cons of Option A.
• We lose all the pros of Option A.

Option C: Rebrand all three arms (yAcademy, yAudit, zAudit)
We continue maintaining three separate brands but pick a new brand name for each. The new brands of yAcademy, yAudit, and zAudit would maintain their respective sites, report repos, and social media accounts. One blog is maintained under the yAcademy site.

Pros:

• We get all the pros of Option A.
• We avoid the boring “audit” in the brand names and come up with fresh, more exciting names.

Cons:

• We get all the cons of Option A.
• Extra awareness and communication effort that goes with launching three new brands.
• yAudit and yAcademy won't start with the same letter anymore, so it might affect the link between the two brands.

Option D: Create a new unified brand
We pick a unified brand name for all arms, with a single site, social media account, blog, and report page. Aspects like ZK/Smart-contract auditing and Fellowships would just be different sections or subheadings on our site. There will be a unified blog and report repo with tags to highlight these aspects: e.g. “ZK,” “DeFi,” “Solidity,” “Rust,” or “In-Fellowship” (meaning the audit was within a block, etc.).

This does not impact our internal processes, which remain unchanged, but means we pool all communication, awareness, and client management into one unified interface and process.

Pros:

• We get all the pros of Options A & C.
• We avoid all the cons of Options A & C.
• Presenting a unified image of the breadth of competencies across smart contracts and ZK conveys maturity on par with other auditing services.

Cons:

• yAcademy carries a very good name in the industry.
• We lose the pros of Option B.

Funding and Compensation

We do have fresh graphics and website templates, but there will be other costs such as time expended on updating our presence, announcement write-ups, and legal check-ups.

Implementation and Accountability

Previously, we have developed new graphics and website templates led by Nullity from Core. Adapting and updating our communication channels with the new name and graphics should take about 1-2 weeks. Preparing communication write-ups should take 1 week.