There’s an old engineering joke that there are only two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. Throw in the added complexity of decentralization, and naming things gets even harder.

At The Lifted Initiative, we take naming things pretty seriously. Names have the power to craft understanding and making Web3 more understandable is what we’re all about. Since we’re reimagining the tech stack to provide a more user-friendly developer experience that means there are lots of things that need names.

Here are three categories of work (so far) with three different naming approaches. In each category, we’ve used names as a way to stay connected to the core of our mission that this technology is for everyone.

Lifting all boats

The first category that needed naming was the company itself. We wanted a name that would remind us every day of why we exist.

Right now, the zip code you’re born into plays a huge role into how successful you are, especially in STEM fields. If the goal of decentralized technology is to tear down centralized authority across all of society, we are adamant that benefit should apply to everyone. We wanted a name that confronted existing inequalities, without being patronizing. That meant it couldn’t just speak to us, we needed to engage real people.

After narrowing literally hundreds of names, logos, and taglines down to our favorites, we surveyed scores of strangers and asked them which combination best conveyed our values. Folks really liked the concepts of “unleashed” and “lifted”. We chose Lifted because it was a positive statement (not just the opposite of being leashed)

We’ve since established two corporate entities, the mission-driven Lifted Initiative and the service-oriented Lifted Labs. If more organizations are required, we expect they’ll carry the Lifted banner too.

Enter the ManyVerse

The next category is the tech stack we’re developing. There’s an innovative communications protocol, a fully decentralized network, and a modular framework that combines Web 2.0 and Web3 functionality.

When Lifted started contributing to the Many Protocol, we weren’t sure what to call it but we knew it needed to be distinct from the company, as much as that complicates branding.

That distinction highlights a critical difference between centralized and decentralized projects — the beverage that Pepsi makes is just called Pepsi — but one that we’re far from alone in struggling with. Take a look at the Cosmos network and you’ll see that Tendermint recently rebranded as Ignite to avoid confusion with the Tendermint consensus algorithm to which they contribute. Another example is Protocol Labs, developer of the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) renaming their GitHub project from go-ipfs to kubo to avoid “squatting” the name and leave room for other implementations of the protocol in the Go language.

But what do you call a protocol that allows people to create many different networks that also form one super network-of-networks? The typical Latin and Greek prefixes, like Omni, Meta, Poly, etc. were not only already taken, but we were convinced we could find a simple English word, something like… Many!

Once we knew the protocol would be called Many, we had a path to name the other projects that related to the protocol but didn’t “squat” the name.

The framework of modules implementing the protocol would be called Manifold, as it is a cornucopia of functionality both bountiful and diverse, taken from across the Web 2.0 and Web3 spectrum.

Finally the network that brought it all to life would be called Manifest. Not only is it the protocol and framework made real (or “manifest”) but it’s a platform for anyone with a dream and the drive to make it real.

Meet the dApps

The final category of things that need names are the decentralized apps (dApps) that Lifted has been developing to showcase the underlying technology.

Historically, dApp names have ranged from seriously cool to seriously silly, reflecting the cutting-edge but meme-afflicted world of crypto. A new dApp has roughly even odds to be named after the sword of an occult demigod or a cartoon frog. We wanted to try something different that brought home the idea that the technology we’re building is for regular people: regular people’s names.

Our first dApp was a debugging tool called Kaylee. It was extremely helpful in the early days of making sure our JavaScript and Rust libraries were in sync when it came to calculating addresses from key pairs, encoding and decoding messages, and handling errors.

Next we built a wallet called Alberto. While it started off as “eating our own dog food” to see how easy it was for front-end developers to create an app using the libraries we had just written, we took it as a challenge to make something easy for end users as well. We think it’s one of the easiest multi-signature wallets you’ll ever use.

We can’t wait for you to meet our next couple dApps. Gwen is a control panel that will let you configure and launch your own network in literally minutes and Talib is our twist on a traditional block explorer. As you can see, we’re trying to make sure that names from all ethnicities and genders are represented.

Whether you’ve found this peek into how we’re trying to imbue our mission into everything we do refreshingly inclusive or hilariously pretentious (maybe a bit of both?) I hope you see the care that Lifted takes with the work we do and how we’re making space for everyone to be a part of this community.