Justin Sun May Regret Buying Steemit As Community Plans Hard Fork To Create New Blockchain

TRON’s Justin Sun may soon regret his move to acquire Steemit as members of its community are currently planning a hard fork to create a new blockchain that is outside the control of Justin. 

Launching Hive Blockchain

The soon-to-be-launched blockchain dubbed HIVE will be created through the implementation of a hard fork of the existing Steem code. The upgrade will take place on Friday, March 20, at 10 am EST, according to an announcement on Steem’s frontend application platform, Steempeak.

The Hive blockchain will be forked from Steem, but it will be fully decentralized, working independently from the Steem network.

“While the Hive chain is a fork of the Steem code, the intention is to take responsibility to build something even better. The initial Hive launch will be a direct copy of existing blockchain with a few small upgrades, which will allow us to get back to community discussion on the direction for future development, needed changes, and most wanted chain-level features,” the announcement reads. 

Once the new blockchain goes live, existing Steem accounts will automatically appear on the Hive network. This means that Steem users will have two accounts – the current one of the Steem network and a new one on Hive with exiting content and information remaining unchanged. 

According to the announcement, the history of both accounts will be the same, but future content and transactions will not be the same on the two accounts after the snapshot point. In other words, both accounts will work independently from each other – any actions taken by users on Steem will not reflect on their Hive account and vice versa. 

Buying Communities

Steemit is Steem’s leading social media dApp, and since its launch, it has emerged as the world’s largest decentralized blockchain-based social media platform. All was seemingly good until Justin Sun acquired Steemit last month, a move that led to several heated disagreements in the cryptocurrency community.  

The controversy started after Tron and Steemit announced they would reverse a soft fork of the blockchain while requesting major exchanges, including Binance and Houbi, to use customer’s Steem holdings to vote in their favor.

Several crypto proponents, including famous anti-virus software tycoon, John McAfee, shared their opinions on the issue, commenting that Justin Sun forgot that Steem is a community and communities cannot be purchased. 

Earlier this week, Blocktrades, Steem’s leading validator, explained how Steamit had lost almost all of its value since the recent acquisition. 

“In my opinion, Steemit Inc has nearly zero value now. When Justin acquired it, Steemit absolutely had some strong value, in the form of intellectual property, branding, and experienced blockchain and frontend developers. But now, all the developers he acquired are gone (they’ve all quit),” he said.