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The Steem News @ 2 March 2020 - Special Edition - Steem Makes Blockchain History...

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Today Steem wrote itself into the blockchain history books...

Justin Sun, Tron and Steemit Inc executed a bulk replacement of the top 20 witnesses via a mass power up of exchange backed STEEM.

With the top witness spots secured a new fork was pushed through to reverse the 'freezing' of the Steemit accounts enacted in the recent Soft Fork.

Subsequently three long standing members of staff resigned from Steemit Inc.



STOP PRESS - STOP PRESS - STOP PRESS

@justinsunsteemit has just updated the community on Twitter that today's actions were to protect Steem against "malicious hackers who had illegally frozen 65 million STEEM" [the Soft Fork]...

#steem has successfully defeated the hackers & all funds are super #safu. @SteemNetwork and @steemit community is now stronger than ever since we united & solved the difficulties! Full details below...

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....

We will commit to withdrawing the votes ASAP once we're sure malicious hackers can’t sabotage #steem anymore & will give the voting rights back to the community. All exchanges’ votes will be withdrawn soon. Shoutout to all the exchanges & parties who helped us save STEEM!

Misleading comments re us collaborating w/ exchanges on a hostile takeover is false. Our intention was never to take over the network & all parties' votes will be withdrawn. We wanted to protect the sanctity of private property & the interests of all from malicious hackers.

My deepest apologies to the community, all the exchanges, & various parties involved for this disturbing hack incident. Thanks for your support to @steemit and @SteemNetwork. Always STEEM ON!



On the morning of 2 March Steemit Inc / the Tron Foundation launched Hard Fork 22.5 to unfreeze the Steemit Inc accounts that had been frozen by the witnesses in the recent Soft Fork...

Soft Fork 22.2 was maliciously structured, intending to freeze a handful of very targeted accounts and taking away their rights and possession to their owned asset, and may be deemed illegal and criminal.

On March 2, 2020, Steemit regained the staked accounts, so as to course correct the hostile behavior led by a small group of people, and resume the order of the community.

This was achieved by using 42 million Steem from three exchanges Poloniex (owned by Tron), Huobi and Binance which was powered up and proxied to the @dev365 account. That account then voted in 20 brand new witnesses to take the top slots from the existing witnesses.

The 'Open Letter to the Community' published on the @steemitblog account went on to detail its 'Commitment to the Community'...

  • The Steem blockchain will not be abandoned or merged to TRON unless the community decides so.
  • Deploy in the next Hard Fork as soon as possible to reduce power down time to 1-3 days in alignment to other mainstream blockchains, while open for discussion for better economic implications.
  • For the next 4-6 weeks, the Steemit team will be using the voting rights to resume the order of the community while having an open channel for meeting community members and Witnesses. The goal is to protect the Steem blockchain from bad actors, add transparency, and receive community suggestions and advice.
  • After the 4-6 weeks period, the Steemit team will give the governance back to the community when it’s back in order and mutual agreement...

For reference the current witness list can be seen here...

It is understood, but not confirmed that the Tron meeting with the Witnesses on 4 March, and the open Town Hall meeting on 6 March are still scheduled to go ahead.



A key element of what took place was the role of the exchanges that provided the Steem Power to vote in the 20 new witnesses.

In response to this the Steem Community launched an intense Twitter campaign to persuade the exchanges to withdraw their proxy support.

Changpeng Zhao (CZ) CEO of Binance was the first to respond with a number of increasingly hopeful Tweets until at around 3am on 3 March the Binance votes were withdrawn narrowing the gap between the new top 20 witnesses and @yabapmatt at #21. CZ claimed it was a "rubber stamping, oversight"...

At the time of writing @HuobiGlobal was still being lobbied on Twitter.



There has been no further official communication from the Steemit Inc team, however later on 2 March three long standing employeees resigned.

Andrew Levine @andrarchy, Head of Communications...

Michael Vandeberg @vandeberg, Senior Blockchain Engineer...

Steve Gerbino @gerbino, Blockchain Engineer...



There was unsurprisingly a very strong, and primarily hostile, response from the witnesses and the whole community.

Some witnesses have disabled their Apps and dApps such as SteemAuto, dPoll, and also @roelandp's SteemWallet...

And @therealwolf SteemApps.com and Smartsteem.com...

Many members of the community have expressed their disbelief, dismay, sadness, anger...

And even Vitalik Buterin has got involved...



The events of today are already getting a lot of coverage in the crypto media...



Follow @penguinpablo, @steem-data & @steemdapps for more statistics.



This is #274 (02 Mar '20) of this daily news service.



[ graphics & images by @pennsif ]