- Gorbagana began with a X submit regarding decentralisation.
- A pseudonymous developer created the Solana fork inside 24 hours.
- It’s at the moment in testnet.
A brand new blockchain that was jokingly launched final week as a part of an internet debate over decentralisation briefly hit a market worth of $60 million.
The copycat blockchain, dubbed Gorbagana, originated from a satirical back-and-forth between crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko over whether or not decentralisation can exist when one entity controls a protocol’s branding.
What started as a hypothetical situation shortly turned actual: builders cloned Solana’s codebase inside 24 hours, launched a functioning blockchain, and issued a tradable token that drew tens of millions in funding.
Although the blockchain isn’t but stay, it has processed over 14 million experimental transactions and drawn contributions from a rising group of builders.
Gorbagana: a joke that turned actual
The dispute started as a disagreement about what “decentralisation,” a lodestar within the crypto trade, actually means in observe.
Shapiro contended that technical openness isn’t sufficient — branding, too, should be ruled by impartial guidelines if a blockchain is to be meaningfully decentralised. His feedback struck a nerve in an trade the place tasks usually tout decentralisation whereas remaining tightly managed by founding groups or companies.
Yakovenko, whose firm Solana Labs stewards Solana’s improvement, downplayed the function of branding.
“It doesn’t matter what folks name Solana in China,” he wrote, “as lengthy as they’re utilizing the identical ledger.”
In reply, Shapiro issued a public problem: think about two equivalent variations of Solana — one with its current identify and visible id, and one other with none of its logos, rebranded as “Gorbagana” and represented by Oscar the Grouch. Which might the market worth extra?
Yakovenko took the concept additional, telling followers he could be “severely disillusioned” if such a series didn’t exist inside 48 hours. What adopted was half efficiency, half group experiment.
Inside a day, a bunch of pseudonymous builders spun up a working clone of Solana’s software program, full with a functioning blockchain and newly minted token. By then, Gorbagana had moved past mere satire.
Gorbagana blockchain
The primary model of the Gorbagana blockchain and its token have been launched by a pseudonymous developer who goes by MidTermDev.
However the venture shortly bumped into bother. Inside hours, the identical developer launched an unrelated spin-off token known as Baby Gorbagana, which collapsed nearly instantly, plunging to a market worth of simply $8,000 and leaving buyers with losses.
Shapiro publicly distanced himself from the fiasco, claiming he had no management over MidTermDev‘s actions. Shapiro reaffirmed his intention to fork, or copy, Solana correctly and herald a brand new crew of publicly identifiable builders to satisfy the unique 48-hour problem.
To fund improvement, Shapiro on Thursday opened a donation pockets, which obtained $20,000 in its first six minutes and has since grown to just about $40,000. Management of the venture has now shifted to a different pseudonymous determine, Sarv Shaktiman, with Shapiro describing his new function as “chairman-style,” providing steerage whereas stepping again from every day involvement.
A number of crypto developers have already expressed curiosity in constructing functions for the brand new blockchain — an early present of traction that the majority new tasks battle to attain with out providing beneficiant incentives or improvement grants.
Nonetheless in its first week, the venture has already skilled a full market cycle. The Gorbagana token reached a peak valuation of $60 million on June 21, earlier than falling to round $20 million by June 23.
Zachary Rampone is a DeFi correspondent at DL News. Have a tip? Contact him at zrampone@dlnews.com
