Fork Defense Strategies in DeFi

Hey everyone, today we have a repost of an article that appeared today in Bankless by our friend Ian Lee. Ian is a Managing Director at IDEO VC, a crypto fund backed by IDEO that invests and helps incubate early-stage crypto startups. We’ve been spending a lot of time chatting with their team recently and thought this write-up would be really beneficial for all our clients to read as well.

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Since publishing “Fast Follower Forks in DeFi” a few weeks ago, I’ve talked with many founders and investors about the implications and how to design fork-resistant (or embracing) protocols. More teams are preparing to launch fast follower forks in the coming days—and existing projects that have not yet launched a token are talking to their investors about restructuring their token cap tables to make them more “fair” (and thus more fork-resistant—or at least that’s the hope).

The protocol wars are officially upon us, marking a new era of crypto where competitive positioning and strategy matter as much as composability and collaboration.

As a former consultant with a focus on competitive strategy, I find this fun, familiar, and incredibly fascinating.

But it’s more than just intellectually interesting—competitive strategy is now critical to crypto projects and founders who aspire to build something valuable, defensible, and lasting in our space.

Not All Forks Are the Same

First, you have to realize that not all forks are the same. Each has a different intended outcome, approach, and strategy. Since Sushiswap’s ‘vampire attack’ on Uniswap two weeks ago, we have now seen multiple archetypes of forks—some of which were anticipated, and others which are still new and emerging.

From “Fast Follower Forks in DeFi”:

• Pump & Dump Forks: Forks whose primary purpose is to make a few people a lot of money, get a lot of people REKT, then move on to the next one. There have been many of these lately—particularly forks of YFI, Sushiswap (itself a fork of Uniswap), YAM, and others.

 

• Fast Follower Forks: Forks trying to unseat an original protocol or do something a little better—whether token distributio