  In collaborative social development platforms such as GitHub, forking a
repository is a common activity. A variant fork wants to split the development
from the original repository and grow towards a different direction. In this
preliminary exploratory research, we analyze the possible reasons for creating
a variant fork in blockchain-oriented software. By collecting repositories in
GitHub, we created a dataset with repositories and their variants, from which
we manually analyzed 86 variants. Based on the variants we studied, the main
reason to create a variant in blockchain-oriented software is to support a
different blockchain platform (65%).
