"Palace Fight" triggered by an acquisition: Steemit team declares war on the community

Decentralized content platform Steemit recently partnered with the Tron Foundation. It used the resources of Huobi, Binance and Poloniex to revoke the latest network changes, which triggered strong community protests.

On February 14, Steemit reached a "strategic cooperation" with Tron. Chairman Steemit announced on social media that he had sold Steemit to Justin Sun, Tron's founder.

Fearing that TRON might have too much power in the network, on February 24, the Steem community decided to deploy a soft fork. This soft fork can invalidate the voting rights of a large number of tokens held by Tron and Steemit.

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However, this "soft fork" failed to prevent a "malicious takeover" on Monday-with the help of the collective voting rights of tokens held by exchanges such as Huobi, Binance, Poloniex, which actually undermined the community Work hard.

According to a list of accounts announced yesterday, the three exchanges collectively aggregated more than 42 million STEEM Power (SP).

By holding a large number of stakes, the Steemit team was then able to unilaterally implement a hard fork of 22.5, thereby regaining their stakes, and voting all the top 20 community witnesses (voice)-responsible by voting Server operators who produce blocks-exclude them, the top 20 operators all use the account @ dev365 as a proxy. In the current Steem Witnesses list, Steemit and Tron's Witnesses occupy the top 20 positions.

According to the article on the hard fork published on Steemit's website, the Steemit team-composed of "Tron and Steemit Corporation"-defended its actions, saying that the soft fork 22.2 was "immoral and illegal" .

"The structure of the soft fork 0.22.2 is malicious, with the intention to specifically freeze some accounts and deprive them of their rights and ownership of assets, which may be considered immoral and against the rules. They even threaten to be hard Fork and abolish all existing STEEM tokens, putting the interests of every honest STEEM holder, developer and community at risk. "

"In the next 4-6 weeks, the Steemit team will use voting rights to restore community order while providing an open channel for community members and witnesses. After 4-6 weeks, the Steemit team will return to normal and reach the community. After agreement is reached, the right of governance is returned to the community. "

Under existing regulations, STEEM cannot be withdrawn for the next 13 weeks, which means that customers will not be able to access their assets during this time. To address this, the Steemit team is deploying an emergency hard fork to reduce this time to 1 to 3 days.

Binance Chief Executive Zhao Changpeng said on Twitter that in light of the community's response, Binance will withdraw the voting stake it holds.

"I knew this upgrade / hard fork in advance and approved it. This is common in projects and we usually support it. Based on your feedback, we may cancel the vote, which requires several locations May take some time to coordinate. "

When someone asked if the exchange was making a profit from this network update, Zhao Changpeng added, "We haven't received a penny and thought it was just a regular upgrade / hard fork."

Community resists hostile takeover

Community member @jeffjagoe was one of the first to warn about the move, accusing the exchange of using customer funds to facilitate the move.

"The stakes are basically pre-mined and are said to be used for community building. Witnesses have decided to freeze these funds to prevent malicious takeover of the network. But they forget that Sun Yuchen has a lot of money and can use it to buy exchange partners. "

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buteri also joined the discussion and gave his views on the incident.

"Obviously, Steem DPOS has been taken over by large exchanges who voted with user funds. This seems to be the first typical example of a 'bribery attack' on voting on tokens (such bribes are provided to facilitate Get their votes). "

Some developers were disappointed with Steemit and TRON's decision, and decided to deactivate their applications developed on the Steem blockchain. For example, the SteemWallet team announced that they have removed the app from the Apple App Store. Steem Engine also shut down its website "in protest of a malicious takeover of this blockchain."

As of press time, the Steemit team has yet to respond.

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