7 Simple Tips for Web3 Startups to Protect Their Brand

The Web3 space is exciting, innovative, and growing fast. But with all the opportunity comes risk—especially when it comes to protecting your brand. Scammers, phishers, and impersonators can wreak havoc on your reputation, your community, and even your revenue.

The good news? You don’t need a massive budget or external service providers to start protecting your brand today. With a few tools and some strategic effort, you can build a solid foundation to safeguard your digital presence. 

If you’re a founder in the early stages of building your Web3 project, or an early marketing or security hire at a start-up, these tips are for you. Let’s dive into 7 simple tips that Web3 startups can use to protect their brand.

7 Simple Tips for DIY Brand Protection

1. Create a Unique Brand

One of the most simple, but important strategies for protecting your brand, is to build a brand that is unique. A unique brand is more challenging to copy, and easier to identify when being impersonated or copied.

So how can you stand out from the crowd? Avoid words or names that are crowded on Google search. Make sure your name, and your branding,  isn’t similar to other brands within the industry. You’ll also want to avoid  “poisoned” domains and social media handles that have been previously used for malicious purposes. 

2. Take Inventory of Your Digital Assets

Your first step in protecting your Web3 brand is understanding what you’re protecting. Your “brand” encompasses every way your company interacts with the outside world, including your company name and logo, your domain and social media profile, and your community and employees. 

The goal of asset inventory is to identify all these parts of your brand, and which assets are most at risk of attack. Start by listing out all of your brand assets in a single document, include things like:

• Visuals: Company name, logos, slogans, and brand colors.
• People: Founders, employees, ambassadors, and investors.
• Digital Platforms: Domain names, social media accounts, blockchain addresses, and community platforms.
• Third Parties: Vendors, partners, and white-labeled tools representing your brand.

You might also have “shadow” assets. These are assets that may have been created by someone on your team or a third-party on your behalf, for example, a subreddit created by a fan. 

There are also “ghost” assets, which are assets that were once used by your brand, but have since been retired, like an old blog domain you no longer use. Tools like Sherlock and Subfinder can help identify these. 

Once you have a detailed list of all existing assets, it’s time to organize them. Identify who has access and ownership of each one, and have ownership transferred to the founding team or lead marketer in your organization. If there are any assets that are not yet claimed on very popular sites and platforms or domain names, consider registering these assets for your organization.

Focus on your most critical assets—the ones that would hurt your business the most if compromised—and ensure they’re registered, up-to-date, and under your control. You’ll also want to identify the top five assets based on how critical they are to your brand. Consider what impact they could have if compromised or impersonated.

3. Detect Threats Early

Scammers often target Web3 brands through impersonation, phishing, or fake domains. Proactively monitoring for threats helps you stop them before they cause damage.

To detect threats early, start with your domain and your Twitter account, and build a routine in your calendar of steps to run an audit every month. Develop an email template for copyright or trademark violations that you can send to domain and hosting providers.

Be sure to keep track of the number of detections you have found each month. Look up how long these threats have been live for to get an estimate on the mean time to remediation (MTTR). 

This will be an important metric to measure, especially if you later decide to invest more resources or budget on this activity. The more unique your brand is, the harder it is for scammers to impersonate and the easier it is for you to find their fakes.

Here are some free tools and detection sources to get you started:

DNSTwist

Use this tool to find typo-squats, homoglyph attacks, and phishing pages similar to your main domains.

URLScan

Use the search tool to search your main company domains and then look for similar scans based on:

• Page Title
• Favicon
• Visual Similarity
• Structural Similarity

Once you’ve found a scam or phishing sites, you can then pivot on other properties that identify scams using the same phishing or wallet drainer kit:

• Unique filenames or file hashes
• Global variables
• Messages printed to the console
• Network requests

If you have the budget, consider upgrading to URLScan Pro as it has a lot of useful features for brand protection that aren’t available in the free offering

IOK Rules

If you find a set of Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) that are common among scams targeting your brand, consider writing these out as detection rules using IOK by phish.report.

Once you get comfortable with writing queries on URLScan, IOK rules and the IOK debugger make for a great threat hunting combo.

Twitter Search

Periodically run a Twitter search for your brand name and staff members to see what impersonators you might have. If you’re using X Pro, you can set up a Tweetdeck. 

Some patterns to search for:

• <brand> airdrop
• <brand> claim
• Ticker symbol, ex. $GRT
• Hashtag, ex. #airdrop, #metamask

Search through the replies on your own posts and on your staff members posts for any impersonators or phishing links as well

Google Search and Ads

Use Google search operators and basic search terms to find scammers poisoning your search results

Some things to check:

• <brand> airdrop
• <brand> login
• <brand> claim
• site:*.webflow.io (intitle:<brand> OR inurl:<brand>)
• site:*.gitbook.io (intitle:<brand> OR inurl:<brand>)

Keep an eye out for fake Google Ads as well, you can see them been shown at the top of search results if the scammers take out an ad across common search terms for your brand

4. Enforce Your Rights

When you discover impersonation or misuse of your brand, act quickly to enforce your rights. This can be accomplished in three different ways:

• Request platform to take down the offending content.
• Request platform to transfer ownership of the asset to you.
• Warn users of potential phishing/malware/malicious activity using third-party blocklists

Enforcement often involves:

• Takedown Requests: Report violations to platforms like Twitter, Telegram, or hosting providers. Use tools like Phish.report to find abuse contacts for hosting sites.
• Blocklist Submissions: Flag phishing domains with services like Google Safe Browsing or MetaMask’s Phishing Detector.
• Ownership Transfers: For critical cases, request ownership of impersonating assets.

Having templates ready for trademark or copyright violations can save time and ensure a consistent response.

5. Monitor Consistently

Brand protection isn’t a one-time effort, it’s an ongoing process. Scammers are always finding new ways to target Web3 companies. To stay ahead, make monitoring part of your regular workflow.

Take steps to automate more and more of the process to keep up pace with scammers, and plan to find ways to set up detection so that results come to you, versus you having to go out to find them.

Automate where possible to track threats efficiently. For example:

• Use URLScan Pro to automate scans and subscribe to new results via email/Slack.
• Maintain a spreadsheet to log incidents, including mean time to remediation (MTTR).
• Create summary reports to share insights with your team and stakeholders.

If you’re using a spreadsheet to track your work, make sure to add a summary table to visualize and understand the macro trends in your brand protection pipeline. This consistent monitoring will allow you to spot trends and allocate resources effectively.

6. Simplify and Reduce Your Attack Surface

The more digital assets you have, the harder it is to protect them all. Start simplifying:

• Consolidate Unused Assets: Delete or retire duplicate, unused, or low-priority accounts.
• Focus on Key Assets: Prioritize your most critical communication channels, domains, and platforms.
• Review Third-Party Relationships: Ensure contractors, vendors, and partners align with your brand values and security practices.

By reducing your digital footprint, you make it harder for scammers to find vulnerabilities, especially with neglected assets.

7. Build a Clear Source of Truth

Make it easy for your community to verify your official accounts and links. Create a centralized resource—like a webpage or pinned post—with all your official domains, wallets, and social media accounts. For example, Sophon has created this page as a source of truth, as well as a public tool for checking the authenticity of assets. 

Proactively refer to this resource in your communications to build trust and reduce confusion. The clearer your source of truth, the harder it is for scammers to mislead your audience.

Get Started With Brand Protection for Your Web3 Startup

The key to brand protection is to start early in the process and build your brand with a security mindset. Brand protection in Web3 is a marathon, not a sprint. Start small! Focus on the assets and threats that matter most, and then scale up as your company grows. By dedicating just a few hours a month to these six steps, you’ll build a more resilient brand that’s prepared for the challenges ahead.

Stay vigilant, stay secure, and protect what you’ve worked so hard to build!

Ready for extra support in protecting your brand? Book a ChainPatrol demo to learn how we can help.