When Crypto Hires a Design Agency: Stellar's Story

In the early years of cryptocurrency, logos were made by founders, forum users, and volunteer designers. They were functional marks created by technical people who needed something to put on a website. Then, in 2019, the Stellar Development Foundation did something that was still unusual in the crypto world: it hired a professional design agency. The result was one of the most significant visual transformations in cryptocurrency history and a signal that the industry was growing up.

The Rocket Era

Stellar launched in 2014, founded by Jed McCaleb (who had previously co-founded Ripple) and Joyce Kim. The project's original logo was a stylized rocket ship — a literal interpretation of "stellar" as something related to space. The rocket was simple, cartoonish, and immediately recognizable. It looked like it belonged on a startup's landing page circa 2012, which is essentially what it was.

The rocket communicated ambition and velocity. It said: we are going somewhere, fast. For a young project trying to attract developers and early adopters in the cryptocurrency community, this was an effective message. The space metaphor also connected to the project's name and to the broader culture of crypto optimism — "to the moon" was already a rallying cry.

But the rocket had limitations. It was informal, almost whimsical. It evoked hobbyist rocketry more than global financial infrastructure. As Stellar matured and began pursuing partnerships with banks, payment processors, and government agencies, the rocket became a liability. You cannot walk into a meeting with IBM's blockchain division — which partnered with Stellar in 2017 for cross-border payments — with a cartoon rocket as your brand mark.

Choosing Kurppa Hosk

The Stellar Development Foundation selected Kurppa Hosk, a design agency based in Stockholm, Sweden, to lead the rebrand. The choice was deliberate and telling. Kurppa Hosk (later acquired by the consultancy McKinsey and rebranded as McKinsey Design, though the Stellar work predates this) was known for clean, Scandinavian-influenced design with a focus on technology brands. Their portfolio included work for Spotify, Klarna, and other Nordic tech companies.

Hiring a Nordic design agency sent a message about Stellar's aspirations. Nordic design is globally associated with clarity, functionality, and understated elegance — the visual language of IKEA, Volvo, and Scandinavian architecture. By choosing this aesthetic lineage, Stellar was positioning itself not as a scrappy crypto startup but as a mature technology platform with institutional ambitions.

The decision to hire an outside agency at all was notable. In 2019, most cryptocurrency projects still handled branding internally or through community contributions. A few — notably Ethereum with its brand guidelines and Tezos with its Cathie Wood-era marketing — had invested in professional design. But the idea of paying a prestigious agency for a full rebrand was still seen as an extravagance in a community that valued code over aesthetics.

The Saturn Ring

The new logo that Kurppa Hosk created for Stellar replaced the rocket with an abstract mark: a circle with a ring cutting diagonally across it, resembling a stylized planet with an orbital ring — most commonly compared to Saturn. The mark was rendered in a clean, sans-serif style with precise geometric proportions.

The Saturn-like ring symbolizes cross-border payments orbiting the globe. Stellar's core use case is moving money across borders — converting one currency to another and settling the transaction in seconds rather than days. The ring represents this orbital motion: value circling the world, crossing borders as easily as a satellite crosses continents.

The planet at the center represents the Stellar network itself — a gravitational hub that holds the system together. Just as Saturn's gravity keeps its rings in orbit, the Stellar consensus protocol keeps transactions flowing in an orderly, predictable pattern. The metaphor shifted from a rocket (traveling in one direction, leaving the ground) to a planet (a stable center with activity orbiting around it). This was a maturity transition expressed in geometry.

Design Details

Kurppa Hosk's execution was characteristically precise. The new Stellar wordmark used a custom sans-serif typeface with subtle geometric refinements — slightly squared terminals, even stroke widths, and consistent letter spacing. The typeface was professional without being corporate, modern without being trendy.

The color palette centered on a deep space black and a warm white, with accent colors drawn from a broader spectrum. The previous blue was retained but deepened and made more versatile. The overall effect was a brand that could appear on a developer documentation site, a banking partnership announcement, and a conference keynote without looking out of place in any context.

The brand system also included a set of graphic elements — curves, arcs, and orbital lines — that extended the ring motif across marketing materials. These elements gave Stellar's communications a visual consistency that the rocket-era brand had lacked. Every touchpoint reinforced the same idea: global, connected, precise.

Signaling a Pivot

The Stellar rebrand was not just a visual update. It was a strategic signal. By 2019, Stellar had secured significant institutional partnerships. IBM World Wire, which used the Stellar network for cross-border payments, was perhaps the highest-profile example. The Stellar Development Foundation was also pursuing relationships with central banks exploring digital currencies and with remittance companies serving emerging markets.

These institutional partners needed to see a brand they could stand next to. A cartoon rocket on a conference banner, next to IBM's iconic eight-bar logo, would create a credibility gap that no amount of technical excellence could close. The Kurppa Hosk rebrand closed that gap. The new Stellar logo could sit beside any Fortune 500 brand without looking amateurish.

The rebrand also coincided with a shift in Stellar's narrative. The project moved away from emphasizing its cryptocurrency origins (Jed McCaleb's Ripple background, the ICO era, speculative trading) and toward emphasizing its utility as financial infrastructure. The new logo supported this narrative. It did not look like a cryptocurrency logo. It looked like a fintech logo, and that was the point.

The Cost of Professionalism

The Stellar rebrand was not universally celebrated. Some community members felt that the new logo was too corporate, too sanitized, too far removed from the grassroots energy of the crypto movement. The rocket, for all its limitations, had personality. It was fun. It belonged to the community. The new mark felt like it belonged to a boardroom.

This tension — between community authenticity and institutional credibility — is one of the central challenges of cryptocurrency branding. A logo that resonates with early adopters and developers may alienate the banks and regulators whose participation is necessary for mainstream adoption. A logo designed for boardrooms may feel soulless to the community that built the project.

Stellar chose institutional credibility, and the rebrand reflected that choice honestly. The project was not pretending to be a grassroots movement anymore. It was infrastructure, and its logo said so.

The Broader Impact

Stellar's decision to hire a professional design agency influenced the broader cryptocurrency industry. In the years following the rebrand, other projects followed suit. Algorand worked with the agency Pentagram for brand refinements. Solana invested heavily in professional design. The trend toward hiring established agencies accelerated, and the overall quality of cryptocurrency branding improved markedly.

Stellar demonstrated that professional design was not a vanity expense but a strategic investment. The rebrand did not change the technology, but it changed how the technology was perceived. Meetings with institutional partners became easier. Media coverage became more favorable. The project's visual identity stopped being a barrier and started being an asset.

A Case Study in Growing Up

The Stellar rebrand — from cartoon rocket to orbital ring, from community sketch to agency-crafted identity — is a case study in how a technology project matures. The rocket told the story of where Stellar wanted to go. The ring tells the story of what Stellar has become: a settled, stable network with global reach.

The transition cost something. The playfulness and approachability of the early brand were sacrificed for precision and professionalism. Whether that trade-off was worth it depends on your perspective. If you believe Stellar's future lies in institutional adoption, the rebrand was essential. If you believe crypto should remain countercultural, something was lost.

Either way, the Stellar rebrand remains one of the clearest examples of a cryptocurrency project deliberately choosing its audience through design. The logo does not speak to everyone. It speaks to the people Stellar wants to work with. In branding, that specificity is not a limitation — it is a strategy.