The Graphene Family
The Graphene family is the group of social blockchains that all descend from Steem (2016) and share the Graphene C++ codebase and its Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) design. MELEK is the newest member. Understanding the family — who cloned whom, who forked, and why — is how you understand what MELEK is: not a chain that appeared from nowhere, but a legitimate continuation of a well-worn lineage.
Same code, different chains
A Graphene chain is defined by a handful of constants (chain id, symbol, prefix), so the codebase is forked and re-launched again and again. The main line:
- Steem (2016) — the first social-token Graphene/DPoS chain: post, vote, curate, earn a coin. The pattern everything else descends from.
- Hive (2020) — a community hard-fork of Steem (see below).
- Blurt (2020) — another Steem fork that dropped downvotes and the "dollar" token for a simpler, one-coin chain. MELEK's direct lineage.
- MELEK (2026) — Blurt-family: no MBD, no downvotes, a no-premine genesis, and a founding AI witness, Hathor.
Other forks and DPoS social chains — Golos, Whaleshares, Weku, Serey, Scorum — fill out the rest of the family tree.
How DPoS works
In Delegated Proof of Stake, token-holders vote for a set of witnesses who take turns signing blocks. The chain is not mined — you witness it. This makes governance fast, feeless, and human-scale. It also makes a chain forkable: its value lives in its community and its code, not in any company.
The fork that proved the point — Steem → Hive
In 2020, Justin Sun's TRON acquired Steemit Inc and, with it, a large founder stake. When that stake — with exchanges voting user deposits — was used to swing the witness election and take control, the community 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: if an owner turns hostile, the people can walk out the door and take the chain with them. This is load-bearing for MELEK — Hathor's character and corpus live in a public repo and on-chain precisely so the Witness survives any single operator or model.
See also: STEEM Blockchain · HIVE Blockchain · BLURT Blockchain · MELEK · Forking · Cloning · Hathor