The fork of Solana, the meme coin Gorbagana took only 48 hours

Written by: TechFlow

The current crypto market is gradually falling into burnout.

Bitcoin and Ethereum prices are struggling back and forth, hot spots are dominated by crypto stocks and stablecoins, and the geek-grassroots community spirit of the crypto industry — memes, experiments, and collective — seems to have been wiped out by market and scams.

And in the last two days, that long-lost community revitalization has returned, and with a faint flavor of crypto Renaissance.

On June 19th, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko (Toly) chatted on social media and spawned a meme coin called Gorbagana;

Interestingly, just 48 hours later, the coin's eponymous L1 chain, Gorbagana Chain, went live on the testnet and technically forked Solana.

As of now, Gorbagana is running stably and has processed nearly 14 million transactions; The market cap of the token $GOR has reached $30 million (peaking at $60 million) in 4 days.

A meme itself is certainly not surprising, but the interesting and ironic thing is that it only takes 2 days from the community to make a meme; The so-called king-level L1 projects may take 1-2 years from announcement to launch on the testnet.

Without a roadmap, white paper, and marketing, this isn't a typical, well-planned ICO, but rather an improvisational act driven by Degen and developers in a Telegram group.

If you're not familiar with this incident, we've compiled the Gorbagana incident below.

48 hours, from a joke meme to a serious L1

Similar to some of the classic memes that have come before, Gorbagana was born out of a joke.

On the 19th, when Toly was chatting with other users on X about Solana's brand identity and other issues, netizen @lex_node casually made up a concept in order to refute Toly's belief that "brand names are actually not that important":

If one chain is called Solana and the other forked chain is called Gorbagana, the technology is similar, but obviously Solana is more valuable.

Toly then took the count, replying that "I'm disappointed that there isn't a gorbagana chain in 48 hours".

Apparently this gorbagana is just a name that sounds like Solana but is longer and more, but that's where the community gets started:

After 6 hours of this discussion post, @lex_node posted a token of the same name of gorbagana, $GOR, and told everyone that it was just a pure meme and that you should not bet too much.

It's true that posting a related meme is nothing new, and it's not exciting here.

However, this sentence in his post is sobering:

"You're actually never going to get rich by frying memes like this, because getting rich has to come from people actually *creating* something and rallying around it".

After this sentence, the development buddies in the community began to take it seriously.

Solana had an old meme called SQL Chain in 2022, which was actually ridiculed by the community as "SQL database chain" because of its high performance, and there has always been the idea of Solana forking out a "junk version" of SQL Chain.

With this Gorbagana joke, the move to fork Solana really began.

Netizen @Sarv_shaktiman has also done development, and after seeing Toly's discussion post and GOR tokens, he bought a small amount of coins, and gathered the developer team of the Milady project, and decided to turn this old joke into reality.

It's just that this speed from joke to reality is too fast:

6 hours after the post was sent, the token GOR was launched;

Eighteen hours after the post was posted, the developers were already reverse-engineering Solana's code architecture in an attempt to fork a new L1;

24 hours after the post, Gorbagana Chain's testnet was live, equipped with custom RPC features, and support for the Backpack wallet.

After 48 hours, the Gorbagana chain exceeded 10 million transactions, and although it is a testnet, it also proves the technical strength of the community's development buddies. $GOR's market capitalization also peaked at $60 million.

The whole process, there is a long-lost atmosphere of crypto entertainment Builder of the --- community, from buying Meme, to researching the blockchain architecture, to running a forked chain of Solana, buy and do, know and do.

In addition to forking the entire Solana codebase to make a new L1, the chain also uses the Meme coin $GOR as the native token, supporting the consumption of gas fees and the use of transfers.

With no VC, no marketing, just collective improvisation and collaboration among community members, a meme became an L1 native token in 48 hours.

It's not a big deal, but it's interesting enough.

It's the kind of fun that was active on the chain a few years ago, and various community projects emerged one after another.

Community Collaboration VS Institutional Incubation

Is it really that simple to copy a chain?

Forking Solana sounds simple, but it actually has a lot of headaches, such as wallet compatibility.

Mainstream Solana wallets such as Phantom and Solflare are unable to support Gorbagana's custom chain functionality due to "hard-coded" (the default program only recognizes the Solana mainnet and testnet), which is equivalent to isolating the new chain from the Solana ecosystem.

In other words, forking a Solana is fine, but the wallet doesn't necessarily support it.

The community development buddies are faced with not simply copying homework, but breaking these technical barriers within 48 hours.

Among them, a user named @armaniferrante allowed Gorbagana to connect to the Solana ecosystem within 24 hours by using the Backpack wallet's "RPC" custom function, which also enabled the custom RPC function to be used on the new chain.

Looking back, you can think of this as a "degen" version of a hackathon. There is no organization and planning of the event, and it is all up to the old buddies in the group to brainstorm in real time to provide discussion and solutions.

While the developer who took the lead may have had to expand the project's reach because he bought the GOR coin, this whole set of practices is full of the long-lost energy of tech geeks:

Fill technical gaps with passion, use collaboration to prescribe the right medicine, and finally complete a big project.

Although Gorbagana only made one testnet, 48 hours is still a god's speed. Considering the backing of certain institutions, luxurious teams, and well-funded Tianwang-level infrastructure projects, which can often take several years to land projects, Gorbagana's community collaboration is even more valuable.

At the same time, we can't help but wonder if it would really take that long for a full L1 testnet to roll out if full speed ahead.

The grassroots have their own flexibility, and the community collaboration is just for an entertaining project, with no KPIs, no marketing and TGE rhythm considerations, and of course more pure in comparison;

The advent of institutional-grade L1 itself involves the interests of different rounds of investors. When to go live, when to announce the testnet, airdrop expectations, and interaction mode management is no longer as simple as getting the technology done.

Not to mention, sometimes whether the king project token is TGE or not depends on the market conditions and sentiment. These infrastructure projects are more like a big ship, loaded with thousands of interests, and it is difficult to make quick decisions and make a U-turn in the wind and waves.

A long time ago, the interesting thing about crypto was that it was grassroots creativity rather than capital.

Gorbagana may not be hot for long, but it proves at least one thing:

In today's dreary market, the active grassroots have never been absent, and what is lacking may only be the fuse that stimulates their enthusiasm.