One of the biggest dramas of crypto world – the conflict between STEEM network and its hardfork HIVE community – has entered a new level, when STEEM announced the seizure of $5M worth of tokens.
STEEM blockchain-based social networking platform is going through the hardfork today. On the occasion, the network owned by TRON’s founder Justin Sun starts freezing funds, related to HIVE stakeholders.
The amount of tokens, that are going to be suspended, is around 23.6 million STEEM tokens, which is equivalent to $5 million.
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The network’s members accused the HIVE token holders of posing an existential threat to the STEEM network. Meanwhile, the latter argue that the move might be done in order to retaliate those STEEM users who were against the network’s takeover, led by Justin Sun.
The blockchain-based networking platform had gone through the previous softfork this March. At a time part of its users separated from the mainnet, launched their fork HIVE, suspended the founder’s reward for Justin Sun, and excluded him from their community-led network.
The network freezes 64 user accounts
The network update, called Hardfork 23, is happening today at 14:00 UTC time. The process means a network’s protocol is changing radically, as previously valid blocks become invalid and vice versa. All users and nodes are also obliged to upgrade the latest version of the protocol software.
As states the official announcement, the hardfork is done in order to protect networks stability and community’s property rights:
Witnesses have decided to make changes with HF to protect Steem network stability, enhance Steem user experience, and protect Steem community users' property rights.
Furthermore, the statement revealed the network’s plan to seize some user accounts that actively contributed against STEEM blockchain. The network even accused the holders of such accounts of stealing Steem holders’ assets and named it a criminal activity.
On top of that, STEEM added that the HIVE can not be considered as a protocol update. The network believes that HIVE was a “hostile split action to exclude certain accounts”.
The same announcement revealed that there will be 64 users, whose accounts are going to be suspended and the funds to be frozen.
The users are angry
Meanwhile, the victims – or the community members, who are going to lose their funds today, reject the accusations. According to one of them, the network’s allegations have no proof:
The member who is going to lose more than $80.000 is also claiming in his further Twitter post, that The total sum of stolen funds will be transferred to an anonymous account, whose keyholder is not known.
Meanwhile, another user, who claims to have lost nearly the same amount of funds, calls it right away – a property theft – and offers to sue STEEM in a class-action lawsuit, as there is no justification of unilateral seizure of funds.
The whole conflict between STEEM and the part of its community began a few months ago when Justin Sun acquired Steemit – the blogging application that runs on top of STEEM blockchain. However, TRON’s founder was not enough with that. He used a large part of Steem coins to take over the whole STEEM platform as well. The move inflicted resistance from a community, which created their own blockchain HIVE to escape Sun’s governance.
