- STEEM community is fighting back at Justin Sun after recent blockchain takeover.
- Huobi and Binance withdraw their support leaving Tron founder at a disadvantage.
- A number of employees resign from Steemit.com following recent wrangles.
In the past week or so, Justin Sun has been in a constant battle with the STEEM blockchain participants, who claim the TRON founder is planning to takeover the blockchain. The issue escalated as reports emerged that three centralized exchanges including Binance, Huobi and his privately-owned Poloniex, used their customers’ funds to vote for Justin affiliated witness account. ‘
STEEM as a DPoS system, feared that to give huge governance power of STEEM to Justin, the community is fighting back fiercely.
STEEM community rallies against Sun
Reports have emerged that the Steem community has voted back in some four Blockchain Validators for Steem known as witnesses after they were replaced on Monday. This will safeguard against Tron’s foundation proposed hard fork that would change the economic framework under which STEEM tokens operate.
On 14th Feb Justin Sun Tron’s CEO, acquired Steemit application and with it a large share of its STEEM cryptocurrency. But Since Steem is a Delegated Proof of Stake Blockchain (DPOS), this leaves an opening for a small bunch of decision makers to challenge the new major shareholder. They voted in an attempt to prevent Steemit now owned by Sun which has a stockpile of tokens from taking over the Blockchain.
When the soft fork was initiated the witnesses ensured that the STEEM owned by some accounts were barred from voting on decisions regarding leadership of the Network. Sun has called out the witnesses claiming such moves were simply undermining the decentralization and sanctity of private property.
(3/9) Such actions are against every aspect of the core value of humanity & decentralization & sanctity of private property. We needed to act immediately to safeguard the #STEEM blockchain & ecosystem when we still had the chance.
— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) March 3, 2020
Notably Binance, Huobi and Poloniex in all which Sun is a shareholder, had combined the tokens that were under their control to vote in new witnesses. Most of the tokens belong to their clients rather than the exchanges themselves.
Steemit Resignation Woes
In just one day Steemit has apparently lost four employees most of them developers and Andrew Levine the head of communications. Although the head count of staff at Steemit is vague it has been rumored to be at least 7 employees.
This is not the first time Sun’s acquisitions have been faced by staff resignation as a similar case when the acquisition of BitTorrent by Tron was faced by significant staff resignations.
Binance and Huobi withdraw their support for Tron’s Candidates
Votes rallying behind Tron’s candidate for witness now reducing after Binance through stated they had ‘unvoted’ as they had no interest in chain governance and intend to remain neutral. Huobi also through a statement noted that they had restored their clients votes and removed their vote from Tron’s witnesses.
Done, unvoted. 1 oversight on my part. Miscommunication/upgrade rubber stamp. 2 @binance have no interest in chain governance. We stay neutral. 3 will continue to support regular upgrades/hard forks.#onwards https://t.co/RQFlul9FTz
— CZ Binance
(@cz_binance) March 3, 2020
Thus we have removed the vote and will always stand behind the decisions of our users. The two witness in the forefront that were part of the those that orchestrated the soft fork have outshone Tron’s backed candidate by a big margin.
