Steemit Community Will Launch Hive Hard Fork to Get Rid of Justin Sun

Steemit community has been restless ever since the announced acquisition of the platform by Justin Sun. Now, they finally decided to break up with Steem. On March 20 a Steemit hard fork named Hive will launch.

forklog.media has covered the entire kerfuffle, from community soft fork and successful counter-attack by Justin Sun in alliance with several large exchanges, to said exchanges withdrawing their support, leaving Mr. Sun face to face with the fuming Steemit community.

Since then concerns about centralization and apparently censorship grew within the community, peaking in an exodus of its most influential part.

Hive Is Breaking Away

“This is a classic ideological split: the people who actively want a centralized chain can stay on Steem, the ones that don’t will build Hive,” said aa Steemit user.

According to some users behind the hard fork, its main goal is to get rid of Justin Sun for good in a way that denies him capitalizing on the community’s intellectual property but keeps the platform intact.

“At this point, it seems like most of the community is in agreement on one thing: they don’t want Justin Sun here. The primary disagreement seems to be how to achieve that. From what I’ve been told, even Justin himself has said he doesn’t want to be here. He just wants to get paid to leave,” explained Steemit major stakeholder named Blocktrades.

Where Soft Fork Fails, Hard Fork Prevails

The initial Hive launch will be a carbon copy of Steemit with few minor but important upgrades. One of them being a change to governance rules.

Namely, a 30-day delay will be introduced on staked funds before they will be eligible to use in voting. This change understandably aims to prevent blitz hijacking of the platform, as performed by Mr. Sun in coalition with Binance, Huobi, and Poloniex.

Hive will mirror all account and user data stored on Steemit and will airdrop the same amount of currencies owned by users on Steemit. With one major exception. Accounts linked to the ninja-mined stake will not receive an airdrop, thus solving that burning Steemit’s issue for Hive once and for all.

Further, according to Blocktrades, Hive boasts a strong developer team consisting entirely of volunteers, while Steemit has lost its entire core team of developers:

“We have more developers committing to work on this new chain than we’ve ever had before. We already have a team of 36 experienced developers, including key devs that were involved in the initial development and maintenance of Steem. And new developers are joining us daily. By contrast, from what I know, Steemit had 4 devs, and currently has none at all.”

This slip may hint that some original developers who quit Steemit amidst Justin Sun’s controversy might have joined Hive’s developer team. But whether it is true will be revealed only after the platform launches.

Sometimes Drama Is Good For Business

A day prior to hard fork Steem’s price surged from $0.12 to now $0.30, while trading volumes also saw a significant increase.

Steem token price chart. Source: Coinmarketcap

The two exchanges that at first stood behind Justin Sun decided to support the hard fork. Both Binance and Huobi recently made corresponding announcements. There will also be a trade-matching exchange service hosted on Bitshares.

Along with increased demand, Steem is enjoying increased attention from many industry celebrities. Buterin himself is closely monitoring the situation, curious to study governance hurdles in DPoS systems.

This seems like a potential positive watershed moment in the history of blockchain governance. If Hive (the fork) overtakes Steem it would be a strong demonstration that the community is in charge and cannot be bought. See also: https://t.co/v2KaORlcp2 /me watches closely https://t.co/eXwHajKJrg — vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 19, 2020

To which Justine Sun reasonably retorted.