The old Ligate mark was two interlocked pill-links. It was fine. It was also the kind of glyph you would find in the settings page of a link shortener. Generic "link" shape, doing generic "link" work.
A logo for an attestation protocol should not be decoration. It should be an argument. Ours was not making one.
Three pieces, one structure
The new mark is three pieces woven through each other. A top hexagon, a left chevron, a bottom-right flag, and each one passes through the other two. Nothing sits cleanly on top. Nothing is removable. Pull one piece and the whole thing stops being a thing.
Three is not arbitrary. Themisra, Mneme, and Iris are three first-party flagships on one protocol. They are not three products that happen to share a logo. They are three pieces of one structure, and the structure is the entire point. "Ligate" comes from the Latin ligare: to bind, to tie. The mark is now, finally, literally that.
Why it is monochrome
We spent a day with one of the three pieces in the sage accent. In isolation it looked good. On an actual page, next to the actual product, it fought everything around it.
The accent already does real work across the site. Section eyebrows, link states, the corner marks on every witness card. A logo that also reaches for the accent is a logo competing with the interface it is supposed to sit quietly above.
So the mark takes one color, whatever the context hands it. Bone on the dark canvas, obsidian on the sage one. It is meant to be the quietest element on the page. That is the job, not a compromise.
The ink, while we were in there
One more thing got fixed in the same pass. The site's ink had drifted.
Pure #ffffff in some places, the older warm bone #EFEAD8 in others,
with no rule deciding which. Pure white on a near-black canvas is a little
clinical and a little harsh, especially on a screen someone is reading at
1am.
Everything is now standardized on #f4f2ec. Still bone, still warm,
slightly off pure white. One token, one rule, every surface.
What this is not
This is not a relaunch. The name did not change. The thesis did not change. Not one line of the protocol spec moved. Devnet is still the only date that matters and it is still Q2 2026.
But the brand is part of the surface that investors, design partners, and developers use to decide whether we are serious. Tightening it is not a distraction from the work. It is the work, the same way the whitepaper and the public chain repo are the work. A protocol asking people to trust write-once attestations should look like it sweats the small, irreversible details.
Now it does. A little more.