A mentor of mine told me once 'look where the money goes, that is where the big dollars are earned'. Not sure if he came up with this by himself or if its origin is somewhere else. But that was the first thing that popped into my mind when I read the latest message from Binance to the Steem community.
Dear STEEM Community Members,
We sincerely apologize for the recent situation involving STEEM, which stemmed from miscommunication about the specifics of the blockchain’s upgrade/hard fork. After receiving the feedback from the STEEM community, we have unvoted.
Binance stays neutral and has no interest in on-chain governance beyond the Binance ecosystem. We hold a supportive position of normal upgrade/hard fork and will continue to do so in the future.
Hopefully, the STEEM community and TRON will reach a consensus in an efficient manner. If they fail to reach an agreement and it poses potential risks/damages to STEEM users on Binance, we reserve the right to take corresponding actions at the consent of our users.
Binance participates in community voting in the interest of our users. We provide staking services to PoS-based crypto users on Binance. Staking rewards generated from community voting are fully distributed to the respective users periodically. We will continue to distribute staking rewards to PoS-based crypto users on Binance on a regular basis. Binance has completed the process of powering down all 31,730,000 STEEM. According to the voting rules on STEEM, the Steem Power is withdrawn over a period of 13 weeks, in 13 amounts that total the amount we selected. Accordingly, STEEM will be released over a period of 13 weeks in 13 equal amounts. Based on the current ratio of VESTS/STEEM at 0.0005103, a total of 24,692 STEEM will be rewarded, which amounts to around US$5,086 as per the market price of STEEM. The rewards will be distributed to all Binance users who held STEEM at the time of voting.
Source: https://www.binance.com/en/blog/421499824684900453/A-Letter-to-the-STEEM-Community
For those who are not familiar with what has happened, just a brief overview. My understanding is that Binance took over the Steem network and tried to force a migration to the TRON blockchain by using their voting power. Unfortunately, Binance used Steem tokens that were owned by their customers to get enough voting power within the Steem network. Legally, well...Binance makes the rules I guess and some people stated it is not much different from all other exchanges who 'earned' new tokens from hardforks by utilizing customer's coins stored on the exchange during the snapshot.
However, it seems now, that the impact of the crypto community is way too big and might have a bigger impact on other projects that Binance stopped pursuing on moving Steemit to Tron. A win for decentralization?
What is your opinion about Binance and their takeover of Steemit? Please let me know in the comments.
