Almost every conversation about internet-native brands opens with the technology. The chain, the token, the mechanism. It is the first thing most founders in the category want to explain and roughly the first thing most audiences stop listening to. The contrarian move is to refuse to lead with any of it, and that refusal is the actual center of how one of the category’s most recognizable brands got built.
Luca Schnetzler, who operates publicly as Luca Netz, has held this line for years. His thesis is that the durable advantage is emotional connection, not the technology underneath, and that the technology should be invisible to the people it serves. He has stated the goal about as plainly as it can be stated. The point of the brand, he told Fortune, is to “make people feel good.” Four words. That is the whole strategy compressed.
The Disney Comparison He Reaches for
He does not benchmark against other crypto projects. He benchmarks against entertainment. In a DappRadar interview he split “transactional utility,” which is making holders money, from “emotional utility,” which he argues Disney mastered: content, messaging, and branding that make people genuinely attached. The first kind, in his read, is a liability treadmill. The second is a moat. It is not a new idea in consumer products. It is close to the oldest one, applied to a category that mostly walked away from it.
The treadmill metaphor is carrying real weight, so it is worth pulling apart. A brand that keeps an audience by paying it has to keep paying it, and the cost compounds while the loyalty does not. The day the payments slow, the audience goes, because the relationship was transactional the entire time. A brand that keeps an audience because the audience is attached to a character runs the opposite cost curve. The attachment deepens and gets cheaper to hold, not more expensive. His whole structural bet is choosing that second curve in a category that defaults to the first, and most of the criticism aimed at him comes from people who only recognize the first one.
Quality Over Volume, Stated as Policy
The operating consequence of an emotion-first thesis is a bias toward restraint. A brand whose value sits in how people feel about it is hurt more by dilution than by silence. The client’s own content guidance says this outright: quality over volume. For most brands that is an aspiration nobody enforces. For a brand built on attachment it is risk management, because every weak expression of the character draws down the exact asset the strategy is built on.
That runs straight against the prevailing content logic, which rewards frequency and treats every channel as a thing to feed every day. The emotion-first model inverts it. If the character is the balance sheet, then shipping something mediocre is not harmless activity that at least keeps the feed warm. It is a withdrawal. The discipline to post less, ship less, and license less than the calendar would allow is not caution dressed up as strategy. It is the only behavior that is actually consistent with believing the thesis you say you hold.
This is the part that sounds soft and is not. Consistency and craft are not aesthetic preferences here. They are the balance sheet.
Community as Standing Distribution
The second pillar is structural. Schnetzler designed the brand so its earliest supporters share in the commercial upside rather than just consuming the output. The phrasing he keeps returning to, including with Refresh Miami, is that a supporter is “not just a consumer” but a participant. An aligned community, in this model, does the job paid acquisition does for everyone else. The difference is that a campaign ends and an incentivized community does not.
The economic substitution is the part most analysis skips past. Customer acquisition is the single biggest recurring cost for most consumer brands, and it resets to zero the day the budget stops. A community with a genuine stake in the brand’s success is not a cheaper version of that spend. It is a different category of asset, one that appreciates alongside the brand instead of being burned to fuel it. He is not running marketing more efficiently. He moved the function off the income statement and into the ownership structure, which is a far more aggressive thing to do than it looks from outside.
Read as a technical detail, it gets dismissed. Read as incentive design, it is the entire strategy. The recurring question he seems to put to any initiative is whether it strengthens the relationship with the people who carry the brand forward, or just extracts from it.
The Objection Worth Taking Seriously
The fair counterpoint is that emotional connection is easy to claim and hard to prove, and that plenty of brands wave the word community around while running ordinary extraction underneath. The thesis is only credible to the extent it shows up in decisions that cost something. The evidence that counts is not the language. It is the willingness to accept lower volume, pass on dilutive licensing, and hand an audience real upside instead of rhetorical inclusion. Those are choices with a price attached, and a brand that pays them is making the argument in the only currency that matters. A brand that only says the words is not, and the difference is usually visible inside a quarter of paying attention.
Storytelling as the Actual Product
Under both pillars sits a view that the story is the product. Schnetzler has framed the ambition to Blockworks not as competing with other tokens but with Pokemon and Hello Kitty over a horizon measured in years. The characters are treated as participants in an ongoing narrative, not static logos. The claim is direct: people adopt brands they can tell stories about, and a brand that hands its audience a story to share has solved its hardest growth problem before it has spent a dollar on distribution.
The thesis is unfashionable for the simple reason that it is not new. It is a return to consumer-brand fundamentals, run with discipline in a space that keeps inventing fresh reasons to ignore them. That is the substance of his point of view, and the reason it deserves more attention than the technology he deliberately keeps out of sight.
