Steemit's decentralized blogging platform, which recently partnered with the Tron Foundation, leveraged the resources of leading crypto exchanges - Huobi, Binance, and Poloniex - to undo recent changes to the Steem blockchain. It is reported by The Block.
Steemit entered into a “strategic partnership” with Tron on February 14, while Steemit chairman announced the sale of the platform to Justin Sun.
Fears that Tron might have too much power on the network have led the Steem community to decide to launch a soft fork that canceled the vote with Tron and Steemit tokens.
SoftFork, however, could not prevent the so-called “hostile takeover” of the blockchain, which took place on Monday and actually nullified the community’s efforts - thanks to the collective voting by tokens of the Huobi, Binance and Poloniex exchanges. According to the list of accounts, as of March 2, these three exchanges hold more than 42 million STEEM Power (SP).
Having received such tremendous support, the Steemit team was able to unilaterally conduct a hard fork to return their steak and select 20 “witnesses” (an analog of the block validators in Proof-of-stake). In the current list of witnesses, Steemit and Tron occupy the first 20 places.
According to a Steemit website, a platform team consisting of “guys from Tron and Steemit Inc” called soft fork “criminal and illegal.”
“The purpose of this malicious software fork was to freeze several very important accounts, which can be considered illegal and criminal. They even threatened a hard fork, endangering every STEEM owner, developers, and the community as a whole ... Over the next 4–6 weeks, the Steemit team will use their voting rights to restore order in the community along with open meetings with community members and witnesses ... After 4-6 weeks, the Steemit team will return to the community. ”
According to existing rules, STEEM voters cannot be withdrawn within the next 13 weeks, which means that customers will not be able to access their assets during this period. To solve this problem, the Steemit team deploys a hard fork, which will reduce the lock time to 1-3 days.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said Binance could withdraw its voting steak.
“I was informed about this update / hard fork in advance and approved it. Projects do this all the time, and we usually just support them, ”said Zhao. “We are likely to cancel the vote depending on your feedback. This procedure requires the participation of people in several different geographical locations, which will take some time. ”
“We did not take a dime. We thought it was a normal update / hard fork, ”Zhao said in response to a statement that exchanges were paid to support network changes.
Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin commented on this incident:
Obviously, the Delegated Proof-of-Stake, a consensus algorithm in Steem, was taken over by large exchanges that voted with client funds. It looks like the first major case of an “actual bribery attack” when voting with coins (by bribery refers to exchanges that offer holders convenience in exchange for their votes).
Some developers expressed disappointment at the Steemit and Tron solutions and decided to deactivate their applications on the Steem blockchain. So, the SteemWallet team removed their application from the App Store. Steem Engine also closed its site "in protest against the blockchain hijacking."
