Spoon

What Is A Spoon (Blockchain)? 

A spoon is a form of a blockchain fork in which the new currency receives the account balances of an older cryptocurrency. It lets a new project piggyback its own features on the previous software while letting the older users of the existing protocol join it. 

Projects “spoon” in order to entice the users and developers of a well-known platform. Spoons are more harmonious than combative in purpose. However, they are not very common in the blockchain industry since implementing spoons is not easy. 

Different from a Hard Fork

A spoon differs from the more frequent hard fork by purpose and definition. Most hard forks result from a quarrel between the existing and new blockchains. On the other hand, spoons are collaborative by purpose. Hard forks use the current token from the existing chain, while spoons just copy balances and create a new custom token for their purposes. Moreover, hard forks are planned to snip the market share and domination of an existing platform. At the same time, spoons try to supplement the technical prowess of the projects they piggy-backing balances from.

Because of its large user base and developer network, Ethereum is the most used platform for spooning. Common spooning examples are Athereum and Cosmos, which both took snapshots of the Ethereum blockchain to note account balances onto their new networks. 

These networks are still linkable with the Ethereum main net in different ways and also share their improvements and functionalities with it. However, despite copying balances, they use their tokens and not ETH.