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TRON and Steemeit have decided to reverse a recent soft fork of the blockchain, which aimed to reduce their ability to sway governance decisions. According to certain reports, this effort was blindly assisted by major cryptocurrencies such as Binance, Huobi, and Poloniex because the tokens held by those exchanges were used by Steemit and TRON to overturn the soft fork while maintaining control over the network.
What Happened With Steemit And TRON?
As Cryptopotato reported in February, Steemit – the largest decentralized social media and a blogging platform, announced a strategic partnership with TRON.
On February 24th, Steemit implemented a “Steem Protection” soft fork that had the voting power of a large number of tokens owned by Steemit and TRON deactivated. Yesterday, however, an event that has been described as a “hostile takeover” took place, and the soft fork couldn’t prevent it.
Based on a list of accounts that were powered up on March 2nd, three exchanges managed to put in 45.6 million STEEM power. As such, the Steemit team wasn’t able to implement fork 0.22.5 that sought to regain their stake and vote all the top 20 community witnesses out.
Currently, Steemit and TRON’s witnesses make up for the first 20 slots of the list above. In an attempt to justify these actions, the Steemit team released a blog post which argued that the previous soft fork 0.22.2 was “criminal and illegal.” The same was reaffirmed by Justin Sun in a detailed Twitter thread.
#STEEM has successfully defeated the hackers & all funds are super #SAFU. @SteemNetwork and @steemit community is now stronger than ever since we united & solved the difficulties! Full details below👇
— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) March 3, 2020
According to the blog post, the implementation of soft fork 22.2 “threatened to hard fork and nullify all existing STEEM tokens, putting every good STEEM holder developer and community interest at danger.”
With this said, Steemit has taken full control of the network for the next 4-6 weeks to “resume the order of the community while having an open channel for meeting community members and Witnesses.”
A Hostile Takeover?
While the above is the version described by TRON and Steemit, people have various opinions on what happened. Community members think that this was an attempt to flat-out take over the Steemit network.
Vitalik Buterin reaffirmed:
“Apparently Steem DPOS got taken over by big exchanges voting with depositors’ fund. Can anyone confirm and/or provide details?” – he Tweeted.
That’s not everything. Certain developers on the network decided to express their frustration by taking down their dApps. The Steem Wallet was taken down from the Appstore, while other dApps are also being shut down in a form of protest.
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