After a little more than 2 and a half years since the Steem blockchain started, it's great to see how far we've come and continually grow.

It has been interesting to see lately other forked versions of the Steem blockchain. We first saw a forked Steem project with Golos. It was a Russian forked version of Steem and it was great at the time because it was a way to see the experiment grow and have competition.

But it was no competition...

Since then, we haven't seen a few forked versions that took noticed until maybe recently.

There was a couple forked chains that launched and they have interesting takes on the Steem blockchain. They are tailored to a specific community and have their own chain.

Recent Forked Chains

Scorum

The Scorum platform launched in March 2018 and is catered to the sports community.

What makes these forked versions interesting is that they are having their own take on how the chain should work. When it comes to the Steem blockchain, the token is inflationary. That means there is no cap on the supply so it will continue to grow over the years at a set annual rate. Only a Hard Fork could change that but when it comes to Scorum, they have a deflationary supply. Meaning they have a capped supply. There will only be 20 million Scorum tokens in supply.

Going through some of Scorum's changes, they have some added features "atomic swap". Although it's currently not enabled yet.

https://github.com/scorum/scorum/blob/de2c67438ccfb8ccfacbb16af474cc19ff7c0904/libraries/wallet/include/scorum/wallet/wallet.hpp

An interesting feature they have on their frontend is when you publish your content, it will go through their anti-plagiarism software, and the algorithm will determine how much of post rewards your content will receive based on its "uniqueness"

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Smoke

The Smoke Network is another fork of Steem that is focused on Cannabis. Yes, even the stoners are getting in on the forks.

But they have a great project and community going. The cannabis industry is exploding and it's a new generation where cannabis is more so something socially accepted and legal in more areas.

This can open new doors to the industry with dispensaries, coffee shops, and other cannabis-related products/services being able to access a blockchain to take advantage of the technology and utilize the features like 3 second transaction time and no transaction fees.

They have their own changes to their code and how the economics are there as well.

https://github.com/smokenetwork/smoked

The change that stood out to me on Smoke was they only allow the official Smoke account create new accounts during their initial launch period as their Main-Net has only been up for a couple of months now.

https://github.com/smokenetwork/smoked/blob/91d3482600d20ecac46737e7670d2c430cc81911/libraries/chain/steem_evaluator.cpp

Not Everyone Supports it...

I understand there are many die-hard Steemians and don't support these forked chains. While I see nothing wrong with these forked chains or people being against them, the data that we gather from having changes to the economics helps us understand what works and what doesn't. Many have to remember that Steem and other blockchains are still in their infancy stages. We are innovating.

Will These Forked Chains Succeed?

Like any other blockchain project, it depends on the development team and the community behind it. Many of us on Steem see the technical benefits of using a graphene-based blockchain with zero transaction fees, 3 second transaction time, and censorship resistance.

In my opinion, some of these forked chains are having some level of success already.

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