Chinese entrepreneur and Tron founder Justin Sun did acquisition of Steemit in February’20 and immediately announced that Steem would be existing as Tron token and the whole dapp eco-system of Steem blockchain would be moved to Tron blockchain. As Steemit was a dapp only, it raised eyebrows of the crypto community. Such announcements were made without any discussion with the Steem community. Then Justin Sun interfered with the blockchain governance of Steem and used huge ninza mined Steem of Steemit INC to vote for the witnesses. He also convinced exchanges like Binance, Huobi and Poloniex (partly owned by Jusin Sun) to vote for blockchain governance as they powered up with the customer funds without permission of the customers. It was literally a hostile takeover of Steem blockchain. The Steem community was aggrieved and they fought back. After huge public outrage and criticism, Binance and Huobi chose to not take part in the blockchain governance of Steem. Steem has 13 weeks power down period after power up, so it caused withdrawal issues in the exchanges. Many top witnesses spots were regained by the community after the incident, but the battle was going on! Justin Sun implanted sock puppet witnesses and started bribing for witness votes. Things were really going haywire!
Image Source - imgflip meme site. It features part screenshot of Justin's original abusive post in Steemit addressing the community members
Justin Sun ranted a few days back in a Steemit post “Do u like Justin Sun or you just want to fuck him?” The post was deleted by him later but it still exists in the immutable blockchain. A few days back, some community members announced to take Justin Sun head on by launching another blockchain. Yes they announced the rationale for doing a hard fork of Steem blockchain. The argument was based on the logic that Steemit was basically a dapp while Steem blockchain had many other dapps. The value of Steem is derived from the value of the dapp eco-system and the vibrant community. If the dapp eco system and the majority portion of the community migrates to the new blockchain, Steem will lose its value. It is logically possible to transfer all values from Steem blockchain to the new blockchain. The community already has resources and skills to operate a blockchain. As the community can’t compromise with Justin Sun’s centralized way of operating blockchain governance, it is ideal to exit and leave Justin Sun with tons of Steem which will lose value day by day in absence of the original community and the eco-system.
The project was named by the community as ‘HIVE’ after discussion. Here is the detailed post regarding HIVE blockchain. The main feature of the blockchain is listed below:
Image is generated by the author - Click to enlarge
Basic difference between HIVE and Steem:
All features will be primarily same. But to prevent governance or funding attacks, HIVE will have 30 days delay on crediting vests towards witness and SPS votes (for Steem it is instant).
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin's reaction to the news
Exchanges supporting the hard fork and potential listing:
Many exchanges have started to announce that they will support the hard fork. Binance is the biggest exchange which announced that they would be supporting the hard fork in this post.Other global exchanges who announced to support the hard fork very recently are - Huobi Global, Bitthumb, Probit. Things turned out sweet very early for this project. Many exchanges are already discussing to list the new coin. A great case study of a community struggle and their effort to rejuvenate and re-brand a blockchain is paving the way into the history.
Official tweet from Hive twitter handle appreciating participation of major exchanges in the hard fork
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