Prominent community leaders and developers of Steem are hardforking steem to create Hive.io. The move is a hostile hard fork and is scheduled to be carried out on 20 March.
Sun’s Tron Foundation acquired Steemit, Steem’s leading social media dapp, on 14 February. The acquisition kicked off a protracted fight between Sun and some prominent Steem community developers over which side leads the chain. At issue are Steemit Inc.-controlled steem tokens known as the “ninja-mined stake” that Sun could have used to determine the blockchain’s fate.
For this initial hard fork, one key thing will change: The tokens from the original development fund controlled by Steemit will not be carried over to the new chain. Everyone else’s will be ported over.
Dan Notestein, founder of Blocktrades, a leading validator on the Steem blockchain, says he believes that Justin Sun “thought this was a voting war”.
In short, rather than continue the fight for Steem, prominent community leaders hope to take their community with them to greener pastures.
The new blockchain is tentatively known as “Hive.”
The fork’s developers plan to make a copy of the blockchain, which has the unique characteristic of carrying in it copies of all the blog posts that people have written to date.
The fork captures the decentralized nature of blockchains. Both chains will have all the content submitted before the hard fork. Which blockchain future content gets posted to will depend on which user interface a user uses. Presumably, if a user is used to blogging on Steemit, their post-hard-fork posts will still get saved on the chain with Justin Sun’s tokens.
Everyone with tokens on Steem will also have tokens on the new chain, that is, except for the Steemit wallets controlled by Sun’s Tron Foundation.
Currently valued at $46 million, steem tokens may plummet in value after the hard fork, say experts.
