You know crypto is becoming more centralized when exchanges take liquid funds and use them to illegitimately vote on the governance of chains that they have no stake in themselves. If that wasn’t bad enough, they are voting for the centralization of Steem in a hostile takeover in collusion with Justin Sun and Tron.

I urge you to vote for the old witnesses or if you don’t know who’s who, to proxy someone who does know. I’m proxying my vote to @theycallmedan who the creator of 3Speak and I encourage you to do the same and share your proxy or witness votes in a post. You can proxy him directly here https://beta.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-proxy?proxy=theycallmedan&approve=1

Justin Sun has used Tron’s influence to get exchanges that hold Steem to vote in 20 new witnesses that are all the same person and then hardfork Steem into a new chain that is centralized and controlled by Tron. If you had suspicions about Steemit’s acquisition, you were right.

Not only did a bunch of high-level staff quit after this hostile takeover because they obviously knew it was wrong and completely against the values of Steem, but there is talk of a new token to be created with it and the integrity of the Steem blockchain is in real jeopardy. The reason this is so outrageous is that it’s on the exchanges for doing this which shows Steem can be easily centralized with enough buying power and that Justin never had good intentions. He didn’t even wait a few more days for the March 6th Steemit townhall meeting with the top 50 witnesses (20 of whom are now the same person).

Binance, Huobi, and Poloniex worked with Ned or Justin to take liquid Steem from exchanges and then to power that up in order to vote for new witnesses as instructed. Afterward, they were transferred Steem for what could be considered payment for doing so. Millions were powered up and used to vote for witnesses chosen by Justin.

The huge issue here is that Justin had his stake and it was not meant for governance. He clearly wanted to use it for governance so the Steem witnesses froze it which was harsh but fair. His Twitter thread is here: https://twitter.com/justinsuntron/status/1234690483298820097. He claims that the original witnesses who froze their stake were “hackers.” He then goes on to say this is against the values of decentralization and then goes on to convince exchanges to use your money to vote for him and centralize Steem under one leader who had no claim to leadership. This is about as hostile as you can get for a takeover. He was only supposed to have bought and taken Steemit, but now he has his sights set on the entirety of the Steem blockchain. With talks of a new token, the original move to freeze his stake was a good one and everything that has happened over the past few days shows Justin’s true intentions which are to rid of Steem and replace it with Tron.

Apparently Binance has also stopped allowing for withdrawals and they want to add in a new hardfork that allows you to power down quickly just so that the exchanges can get their Steem back quickly and be able to manipulate the system easily at any time.

A while back I reported that at any time if any of the top exchanges or top Steem accounts wanted to, they could swap out all the witnesses in moments. Just yesterday exactly that happened and even though we should have some trust in exchanges to do the right thing, we clearly need a trustless solution to prevent something like this from happening again. Check that here: https://youtu.be/ggFBadzAqq8

This is a great video by Luke Stokes which shows what happens: https://twitter.com/lukestokes/status/1234460578825015297

Vitalik is calling it a “de facto bribe attack” on coin voting: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1234522463129800709

TheMarkyMark explains and shows proof that CZ from Binance is playing stupid and acting like he didn’t know what was done wrong here https://steemit.com/steem/@themarkymark/binance-tries-to-back-peddle-and-play-stupid

TheyCallMeDan the creator of 3Speak is a prominent voice of the people trying to fix the situation. He urges you to vote for the original witnesses to stop the hostile takeover or you can simply proxy him your vote so he can do it for you to ensure the right witnesses are being voted for.

This was his post that made me aware of this: https://steemit.com/steem/@theycallmedan/call-to-action-earn-upvotes-to-vote-for-witnesses

Witnesses are shutting down applications like Steemapps.com and Smartsteem.com - https://steemit.com/hive-111111/@therealwolf/statement-0-22-5

Three prominent Steemit staff have resigned amongst this mess likely because they realize Justin has bad intentions.

https://steemit.com/steemit/@gerbino/a-new-chapter

https://steemit.com/steemit/@andrarchy/my-resignation-from-steemit

https://steemit.com/steemit/@vandeberg/an-update

Let me know what you think about this in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe!