on the crypto
On May 19 at 14:00 pm UTC, Steem implemented hard fork 0.23, codenamed "New Steem", sorting out some of Steem's former "witnesses" - blockchain validators - and other interested parties involved in creating a splinter group called HIVE outside the ecosystem, it seems irreversibly.
New Steem, which had only been announced the day before, "will seize some user accounts that have participated in criminal activities by actively contributing to a threat against the Steem blockchain and / or the theft of STEEM owners' assets," said a post by Steemit, announcing the hard fork.
The hard fork
The hard fork's GitHub page lists all Investors to which the tokens will be seized, 64 in total. A letter sent the same day by a law firm representing the affected members - urging exchanges not to support the hard fork - says that a total of 23,6 million token steems will be seized - worth about 6,3, XNUMX million at press time, according to CoinGecko.
A fight between the community and Justin Sun
The hard fork is the latest episode in a continuing struggle for control of Steem's blockchain. The problems began immediately after Justin Sun's TRON Foundation acquired Steemit - Steem's most important partner - for an undisclosed sum in February.
Concerned that Sun might use Steemit's sizeable token allocation to take over the rest of the community, the Steemit ecosystem quickly ran a soft fork that effectively nullified its voting power.
A few weeks later, a split blockchain, HIVE, was implemented that duplicated all of Steem's tokens. However, allocations owned by Sun and some historical members, approximately 83,2 million STEEM tokens in total, were immediately confiscated and stored in a separate portfolio.
Steemit's post states that the exclusion of selected Steem members is illegal and a "clear violation of the ownership rights of STEEM owners". While Sun himself denied any involvement in the hard fork, he claimed on May 18 that he was working with law enforcement agencies to recover his confiscated HIVE tokens.
Points of view
It's hard not to see the New Steem fork as an example of a vindictive move. But a member of Steem known as "Triple A" is not of this opinion. He told a Korean news site that HIVE dissidents' tokens were seized not as a response to their behavior, but because these selected accounts had "continued to attack Steem's blockchain ecosystem."
Triple A also claimed that some HIVE members were guilty of verbally abusing users in the community and even "threatening to murder." But this is not the vision of interested Steem users.
The legal letter defines the fork as "planned theft" and threatens legal action against any exchange that has voted in favor. But exchanges such as Binance and Huobi, some of Steem's major stakeholders, are unlikely to want to take part in this dispute.
