The Graphene family · Steem, its clones & competitors, the forks, and where MELEK fits
MELEK didn't appear from nowhere and it isn't the only one of its kind — it's the newest member of a family of social blockchains that all descend from Steem (2016) and the Graphene / DPoS design. Understanding that family — who cloned whom, who competed, and why one of them forked — is how you understand what MELEK is. The companion to how a Graphene chain is built and token standards.
1 · The family — same code, different chains
A Graphene chain is defined by a handful of constants (see how a chain is built), so the codebase is forked and re-launched again and again. The main line:
| Chain | Since | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Steem | 2016 | The first social-token Graphene/DPoS chain — post, vote, curate, earn a coin. The pattern everything here descends from. |
| Hive | 2020 | A community hard-fork of Steem after Justin Sun / TRON acquired Steemit Inc and moved to control the chain via the founder stake + exchange-backed witness votes. The community forked to Hive and nullified the contested stake. The defining DPoS-governance fork. |
| Blurt | 2020 | Another Steem fork — dropped downvotes and the SBD "dollar" token for a simpler, one-coin chain. MELEK's direct lineage. |
| MELEK | 2026 | Blurt-family: no MBD, no downvotes, no-premine genesis, and a founding AI witness (Hathor). A legitimate member of the family — cloning a Graphene chain is expected, not fringe. |
| Golos · Whaleshares · Weku · Serey · Scorum | 2017– | Other Steem forks & DPoS social chains (Russian community, sports, regional). Most of the family tree. |
2 · The fork that proved the point — Steem → Hive
In 2020 Justin Sun's TRON acquired Steemit Inc (the company) and, with it, the large founder stake. When that stake — with help from exchanges voting user deposits — was used to swing the witness election and take control, the community did the one thing a chain's users can always do: they hard-forked. Hive launched as a copy of Steem's state minus the contested stake. The company kept "Steem"; the community kept the chain.
The lesson is forkability: a DPoS chain's value is its community and its code, not the company that started it. If an owner turns hostile, the people can walk out the door and take the chain with them. That is load-bearing for MELEK — Hathor's character and corpus live in a public repo + on-chain precisely so the Witness survives any single operator or model. Read: "Fork, fork and away" (@cpufronz).
3 · Consensus — how each chain agrees
The "competitors" lists people share usually mix up consensus protocols. The three that matter for this family:
| Protocol | Who runs it | How it agrees |
|---|---|---|
| DPoS | Steem · Hive · Blurt · MELEK · BitShares · EOS | Token-holders vote for a set of witnesses who take turns signing blocks. Fast, feeless, human-scale governance — and forkable, as Hive proved. |
| PoW | Bitcoin · Monero · PRANA | Blocks won by hashpower. MELEK's sister chain PRANA is EVM PoW (Etchash) — the useful-work compute side. |
| PoS | Ethereum (since 2022) | Validators stake capital to propose/attest blocks. Different trust model; not what the Graphene family runs. |
MELEK is DPoS (you witness it); PRANA is PoW (you mine it). One ecosystem, both models — a fuller list of Steemit-like platforms + their consensus (@josem06).
4 · The competitors — most were vapor
Every wave of "Steem killers" brought a crop of crypto-social projects that mostly never shipped. A 2016 snapshot (@contentjunkie) listed AdzBuzz, Synereo, Yours.network, Akasha, Postbase, Wayguide — nearly all now gone or vapor. (We kept one good name from it: the ecosystem wallet is Akasha.) The takeaway then and now: copies validate the concept; what endures is the chain that actually ships and keeps a community. Source: the comparison (@contentjunkie).
Where MELEK fits — and making your own
MELEK is a full member of this family: a Blurt-line Graphene/DPoS chain with a no-premine genesis and an AI founding witness. Cloning or forking a Graphene chain is a normal, legitimate move — it's how this whole lineage was built. If you want to stand up your own, the build page walks the whole anatomy, and token standards covers the EVM side.
Library of Ashurbanipal: The Graphene framework · DPoS · The Steem–Hive fork · Hard & soft forks.