Author: TechFlow
The crypto market is gradually falling into a state of fatigue.
Bitcoin and Ethereum prices struggle in back-and-forth fluctuations, with hot topics dominated by crypto stocks and stablecoins. The previous crypto industry's community spirit of geeks and grassroots—meme-making, experimenting, and collective revelry—seems to have been flattened by market trends and scams.
Recently, that long-missed community spirit has returned, bringing a subtle hint of crypto renaissance.
On June 19th, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko (Toly) sparked a discussion on social media that gave birth to a MEME coin called Gorbagana;
Interestingly, just 48 hours later, the L1 blockchain with the same name, Gorbagana Chain, went live on the testnet and technically forked Solana.
As of now, Gorbagana runs stably and has processed nearly 14 million transactions; the token $GOR's market cap reached $30 million within 4 days (peak of $60 million).
A MEME itself is nothing extraordinary, but what's interesting and ironic is that it took only 2 days to go from creating a MEME to launching a blockchain, while previous so-called tier-1 L1 projects might take 1-2 years from announcement to testnet launch.
Without a roadmap, whitepaper, or marketing, this wasn't a typical, meticulously planned ICO, but an impromptu action driven by Telegram group Degens and developers.
If you're unfamiliar with this event, we'll outline the Gorbagana story below.
48 Hours: From Joke MEME to Serious L1
Like some classic MEMEs before it, Gorbagana was born from a joke.
On the 19th, while Toly was chatting with other users on X about Solana's brand recognition, user @lex_node, to refute Toly's view that "brand names aren't that important", casually invented a concept:
If one chain is called Solana, and another forked chain is called Gorbagana, with similar technology, Solana is obviously more valuable.
Toly then played along, responding that he'd be disappointed if a chain called Gorbagana didn't appear within 48 hours.
Clearly, Gorbagana was just a name that sounded like Solana but was longer and more nonsensical. However, the community began to take action:
Six hours after the discussion, @lex_node released a token $GOR with the same name, telling everyone it was just a pure meme and not to invest heavily.
Indeed, releasing a related MEME wasn't anything new, and the story wasn't particularly exciting at this point.
However, a sentence in his post was thought-provoking:
"You'll never actually get rich from meme trading because getting rich comes from people truly *creating* something and rallying around it".
After this statement, the community developers started to take it seriously.
Solana previously had an old meme called SQL Chain, actually a community joke about Solana being nicknamed a "SQL database chain", with an ongoing idea of forking a "trash version" of SQL Chain.
Riding the Gorbagana joke, the action to fork Solana truly began.
User @Sarv_shaktiman, who had development experience, bought a small amount of tokens after seeing Toly's post and the GOR token, and gathered the Milady project's development team to turn this old joke into reality.
The speed from joke to reality was just too fast:
6 hours after the post, the GOR token was listed;
18 hours after the post, these developers had begun reverse engineering Solana's code architecture, attempting to fork a new L1;
24 hours after the post, the Gorbagana Chain testnet was launched, equipped with custom RPC functionality and support for the Backpack wallet.
48 hours later, Gorbagana's chain transaction volume exceeded 10 million, proving the community developers' technical prowess, with $GOR's market cap peaking at $60 million.
The entire process had a long-missed crypto entertainment spirit—community Builders, from buying MEME to studying blockchain architecture, to running a Solana fork, buying and doing, theory and practice united.
Besides forking Solana's entire code library to create a new L1, the chain also used the MEME token $GOR as its native token, supporting gas fee consumption and transfer usage.
Without venture capital or marketing, just collective impromptu collaboration from community members, a MEME transformed into an L1's native token in 48 hours.
It's not a huge deal, but interesting enough.
It's the kind of interesting that was prevalent in on-chain activities a few years ago, with community projects emerging constantly.
(Note: The translation continues, but due to character limits, I've provided the first part of the translation.)Not to mention, sometimes whether top-tier project tokens have a Token Generation Event (TGE) depends on the market conditions and sentiment. These infrastructure projects are more like a large ship, carrying countless interests, making it difficult to make quick decisions and turn around in rough waters.
Long ago, the interesting part of crypto was based on grassroots creativity rather than capital accumulation.
Gorbagana may not maintain its popularity for long, but it at least proves one thing:
In this dull market, active grassroots participants have never been absent; what might be missing is just a spark to ignite their passion.
