A fork was recently activated that prevented large STEEM holders from voting. Steemit is a decentralized blogging platform built on the Steem blockchain.
Last February 23rd, the people in charge of operating the Steem blockchain conducted a reversible soft fork to prevent major token holders from voting. This decision was made after Justin Sun, from the Tron Foundation, acquired Steemit, the most prominent application of the blockchain.
Steem is a delegated-participation-of-stake (DPoS) blockchain, very similar to EOS, which means that coordinating a small group of people that make decisions can counteract a new and important shareholder. The community took action as Steem owns a considerable number of tokens, which could be used to control the blockchain, even though the pool has never voted before. It is believed that Sun, a shrewd seller and controversial figure within the industry, now owns that large number of tokens.
It should be noted that, when the soft fork was conducted, the network’s validators, called witnesses, blocked the amount of STEEM maintained by a limited set of accounts. In this way, they prevented the voting on those that would govern the network and would participate in other ways to take advantage of the control.
Those funds are said to correspond to some type of founder’s, or pre-mined, reward in most similar blockchains. Sources reported that secret participation could potentially represent about 20% of the current supply, which would apparently make it a block of decisive votes.
Steemit’s shares have always been a source of tension between Steem and Steemit. However, while co-founder Ned Scott was running Steemit, the community felt relatively comfortable about not intervening in the governance. The secret participation was aimed at helping the network grow, but this new owner now makes the group less secure.
Of course, this movement provoked a response from Justin Sun, who said last February 23rd that they a lot to work to do so that Steemit.com can “become the power that it really can be.” Sun listed plans to incorporate various Tron’s cryptocurrencies, take STEEM tokens to more exchanges, and introduce influencers onto the Steemit blogging site.
How Steemit and Steem Work
Steemit, a blogging site that works somehow like a mix between Reddit and Medium, is the best-known application of the Steem blockchain.
Steemit depends on Steem to track its users, as well as to assess its influence on the network. The content that is suitable to Steemit receives a small portion of the new issuance of the blockchain token.
The current supply of STEEM at the time of writing this article is 373,442,235, according to the block explorer Steem.com. It is worth saying that Steem has three different tokens: Steem, which is the main one; Steem Power, which is created when users decide to block Steems; and Steem Dollar, which is a stablecoin.
What makes Steem challenging is the fact that it is impossible to determine how many Steem Power tokens there are in the world. Even though this measure is slowly decreasing, it may eventually increase quite quickly.
A long-time member of the Steem community, James Reidy, said that there are 210 million Steem Power tokens, which could potentially govern the blockchain. There could be as many as 340 million if all Steem tokens were compromised by vote.
By Willmen Blanco
