With four former Steem blockchain validators (known as “witnesses”) being voted back onto the council of 20 nodes that keeps Steem running, it’s becoming clear that the Steem community is striking back after an attempted end-around by Tron founder Justin Sun.
This move means it is no longer possible for the Tron Foundation to launch a contentious hard fork to change the economic rules governing STEEM tokens.
Sun acquired the popular Steemit app and its large share of STEEM tokens on 14 February. Then Binance CEO “CZ” Changpeng Zhao indicated his company was likely to unstake its Steem from the deciding vote.
Meanwhile, on a Discord server managed by one of the newly re-annointed Steem witnesses, token holders have been organizing. Longtime witnesses have been stumping in various private and public forums. It’s activating a new level of voter participation on the chain.
In another development yesterday, four employees of Steemit have quit: Andrew Levine, head of communications; Steve Gerbino, a developer; Tim @roadscape, a developer who works pseudonymously; and developer Michael Vandeberg. Similarly, when the Tron Foundation acquired BitTorrent, that company also saw a rash of employee exits and a subsequent lawsuit.
It’s not clear how many people worked at Steemit at the time of Sun’s acquisition, but one source with knowledge of the community indicated it only had seven employees.
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