# Explore a fork of the Solana codebase for NewChain

Source: https://forum.makerdao.com/t/explore-a-fork-of-the-solana-codebase-for-newchain/21822
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Explore-a-fork-of-the-Solana-codebase-for-NewChain?index=0x654278a08c44a977ce54e902e6ee3187c75f0d5aae78cfb7ecfd7ad7b33fdccf5edd30ee
Submitted by chaomons.eth on 2023-11-01 UTC, 3 upvotes, 0 comments

## Summary

Rune (the author is not named in the text; the post is by an unnamed Maker contributor) argues that forking an existing open-source blockchain is the best route for NewChain. Wait, correction: the text does not name its author, so the claim should be stated without attribution. The article argues that the Solana codebase is the most promising foundation for NewChain, the stand-alone blockchain planned for the fifth and final phase of Endgame, which rebuilds the Maker Protocol's backend and SubDAOs. It cites Solana's engineering quality, its two client implementations, its resilience through the FTX collapse, and the Pyth project's adapted Solana appchain as reasons. It also proposes a Two-Stage Gravity Bridge from NewChain to Solana, alongside the one to Ethereum, and presents Cosmos as the other main option, with the text saying it would cost more to keep performant.

## Article

Explore a fork of the Solana codebase for NewChain

The 5th and final phase of Endgame is the complete reimplementation of the entire Maker Protocol built natively on a new, stand-alone blockchain (codename NewChain). You can read about all the 5 phases here: https://forum.makerdao.com/t/the-5-phases-of-endgame/20830 . The 5th phase is a major long term project, and will likely take at least 3 years, if not longer, before it is realized. But for such a long term project it pays to begin research early.

The most important reason for why NewChain is needed, is that it will allow the ecosystem to use hard forks to gracefully recover from the most severe form of governance attacks or technical failures. NewChain also allows the system to deal with the 8 years of technical debt in the protocol, and means all components of the protocol can be purposefully rebuilt for their exact role in the final, permanent Endgame technical design.

NewChain will mainly contain the backend of the Maker Protocol and the SubDAOs - all user facing products and systems will be untouched and will remain on Ethereum, L2s or other large blockchains, and will be connected to NewChain through advanced bridges kept secure by the Maker Protocol (called Two-Stage Gravity Bridges).

The advanced tokenomics of Endgame will also benefit from running on NewChain, as this allows the ecosystem to recover as much value as possible, minimizing value leaked to MEV and transaction costs.

All of these opportunities come at the cost of having to build and maintain an entire blockchain, which is a major challenge alongside maintaining the Maker Protocol itself. However, the upside is that we don’t have to build it from scratch, and can instead fork an existing open source protocol, which means that most of the work will already be done, and more importantly, if we pick the right project, maintenance will continuously happen going forward.

Solana as the most promising codebase

After having researched all the different options available to act as the foundation for NewChain, I believe that the Solana stack is the most promising codebase to explore further.

There are three major reasons:

The first reason is the technical quality of the Solana codebase, as it is highly optimized for the purpose of operating a singular, highly efficient blockchain, which is what NewChain requires. The Solana codebase is engineered well and benefits from being designed long after the bottlenecks and challenges of blockchains were already well understood, which fits nicely with the objective of NewChain itself in fixing the technical debt of Maker. Solana also already has two client implementations, which is crucial for resilience.

The second reason is that the Solana ecosystem has proven its resilience by having gone through the FTX blowup. Despite all of the issues and hardships, the project still has a thriving developer community. This means that it has significant lindy effect and is likely to stick around long term and means that the costs for development and maintenance will be much lower, and that there will always be a high quality pool of talent available for Maker to access and contribute to.

The third reason is that there already exists examples of the Solana codebase being forked and adapted to act as appchains. Most notable is the pyth project which runs its own adapted version of Solana to act as its backend.

What would using a fork of the Solana Codebase look like

The goal should be to build a symbiotic relationship with the existing ecosystem, potentially by funding and maintaining an independent client, or other similar activities that provide a boost to the baseline resilience of the ecosystem.

We would be able to tap into the large amounts of developer talent available, while also training and increasing the talent pool ourselves - it will be a huge benefit to be able to access all of this in parallel with our experience with, and access to the Ethereum developer talent pool.

Because we benefit from the core Solana ecosystem being resilient, it would be strategically beneficial to ensure there is a Two-Stage Gravity Bridge from NewChain to Solana alongside the bridge from NewChain to Ethereum. This would give the Solana mainnet access to native Maker DeFi features and capital. It would also provide a useful boost to the network effect of the entire multichain economy, since it would connect two of the biggest blockchains with a highly secure bridge that would enable tighter and more security-dependent integrations between the two economies.

Cosmos, the other main contender

Other than Solana, Cosmos seems to be one of the only options available. It also has some major benefits, chiefly its large and high quality talent pool and range of independent developer companies available, and of course the huge amount of existing cases of successfully developed appchains using the Cosmos stack.

The biggest difference between Cosmos and Solana is that Cosmos is not built around efficiency at its core in the same way Solana is which means it would cost more to maintain and keep performant. Cosmos also doesn’t have a strong central foundation organization like Solana has, which could be either a good or bad thing.

Beyond Solana, I have briefly researched Aptos, Sui and a couple other blockchains, however these blockchains appear to not be suitable to our usecase at all compared to what’s available with Solana and Cosmos.