fork it, we ball
as natural as evolution
Forking, in the most literal sense, is when one thing becomes two; when a path splits. The term originated from software. There’s a codebase, someone copies it and starts developing it in a different direction, and now there are two versions. They both have a shared history up to the split point and then independent histories after.
Forking is a known concept in the blockchain industry. Ethereum was probably the first to popularize it, when the DAO was hacked back in 2016 and US$ 60M was drained. It was early on in Ethereum’s journey, so a hack like that was existential to a young ecosystem. The community ultimately decided to fork, while a minority stayed on the original chain (ETC), which continues to exist today.
ETH became the dominant chain by every meaningful measure: developer activity, TVL, cultural relevance, and adoption from non-crypto-native industries. It validates my assumption that forking is not as bad as it might seem. I think it shows a willingness to course-correct, even at the cost of “purity,” which is what saved the Ethereum ecosystem in the end.
the case for forking
I started thinking about forking when I was part of several DAOs a few years ago. In one of the DAOs I was in, there were some differences in opinions about what direction the DAO should go, especially between the founders vs the people running the operations. I was gently trying to suggest a fork, but I didn’t think it was well-received, so I didn’t push for it much.
Everything has been resolved now, but I really feel like things could have turned out better if we had tried a fork. I could see the social dynamics were difficult to overcome when the topic came up, because there was a fear it would fragment the community, a perceived betrayal against the founding vision, the coordination cost, and an admission that things weren’t working out as planned.
Working in the VC industry before and seeing what so many startups and founders went through, I felt differently about it. It’s common when things don’t work out in the startup world, and sometimes that leads to shutting down the company, pivoting the business, or the team separating and doing their own thing. A recent historical example is how Dario Amodei left OpenAI to start Anthropic, resulting in better options for consumers and the world.
Instead of seeing forks as a failure, I see them as a mechanism for resolving disagreements when consensus can’t be made. I think it’s better than the alternatives: forced unity with disgruntled members, slow decay, and resentment. In the end, I should have approached it less strategically and more emotionally.
A fork also lets both visions be tested, and reality picks the winner. I feel that’s the most fair and in-line with how the free market works. It also shows a natural progression of how things play out.
To be fair though, sometimes forks don’t turn out so well. In blockchain, Bitcoin Cash forked from Bitcoin in 2017 over the block size debate, and then forked again into BSV. It became more fragmented instead of thriving, and lost cultural relevance (in comparison to Bitcoin). Forking isn’t always the best approach nor does it always work out.
If we apply forking as a general concept beyond software, I think Taiwan as we know it today was a fork from the PRC trajectory after 1949 politically, and a fork from the shared Chinese heritage that developed differently here culturally.
We are ~100 years in, and while it’s not perfect in many ways, I would consider us a thriving country and peoples. Politically, we evolved from martial law into a full democracy with peaceful power transfers and high civic participation. Economically, we transformed from an aid-dependent island into a tech superpower, home to TSMC and a semiconductor industry that now underpins the world’s digital infrastructure. Culturally, we’ve nurtured a distinct, open identity with strong free speech, an active civil society, and a livable, innovative society that continues to trend upward.
Evolutionary biology shows how life systems adapt by branching out over time. Forking can be painful, but I think that highlights the seriousness of the decision, and could be seen as a healthy progression rather than a tragic one.
Eigenlayer’s founder Sreeram Kannan mentioned that forking is a superpower. One thing I love about the spirit of being in the blockchain ecosystem is that most of the builders are overturning traditional mindsets of what is “right” to being more open-minded about what’s possible. Even now, meeting new crypto people who are still building, makes me stay bullish that it’s about the long game.