Text | Edited by Zheng Yi | Produced by Bi Tongtong | PANews
Just announced the acquisition of "marriage" on Valentine's Day, and "fuck each other" during the honeymoon period. Today, Brother Sun once again contracted the headlines in the circle.
On the occasion of Valentine’s Day on February 14th, just as the EOS community was cheering for the official closed beta of the blockchain social software Voice, another blockbuster was suddenly thrown out. The founder of Tron, Justin Sun, announced on this day that the decentralized social platform Steemit has reached a strategic cooperation with TRON and will officially join the TRON ecosystem, which means that Justin Sun has officially completed the acquisition of Steemit.
The "young and rich" Sun Yuchen has been committed to building his own blockchain empire. In less than 3 years, he has completed 6 direct or indirect commercial mergers and acquisitions. His territory covers download software BitTorrent and blockchain application store CoinPlay , digital currency exchange Poloniex, decentralized live broadcast platform DLive, etc. (another undisclosed one), and the acquisition of Steemit has further strengthened Tron's layout in the blockchain content sector.
Unexpectedly, this acquisition became the beginning of a turmoil. Community soft forks, freezing assets, bribing control nodes and even the DPoS model were also questioned by people in the circle such as Vitalik...
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The soft fork of the original community freezes Sun Yuchen's voting rights
Steemit is a blockchain application based on the Steem public chain. The Steem public chain adopts the Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPOS) model. In this model, after obtaining votes and becoming "witnesses", nodes can participate in the generation of blocks in the blockchain network, thereby obtaining relevant benefits.
In the early days of the Steem public chain, Steemit Inc, founded by Ned Scott, was responsible for the continuous development of the Steem public chain and the maintenance of the steemit application. However, during the application maintenance period, steemit Inc pre-mined a large number of tokens, which is also the root of the tension between the steemit community and the Steem public chain. According to sources, the number of pre-mined token pools may reach 20% of the total , which is enough to have an absolute impact on the current Steem public chain witness pattern.
When Ned Scott was at the helm of steemit, he said that the pre-mined fund pool would not participate in on-chain governance, and that the funds would only be used for developer fees and market expansion. This view was recognized by the community, and the two lived in peace. However, with the completion of Justin Sun’s acquisition, it means that the ownership of the “pre-mined token pool” has also been transferred to him, and the community is very worried about this.
Nine days after Justin Sun completed the acquisition, the steemit community jointly released an announcement signed by witnesses, developers and some other stakeholders. The announcement emphasized that the pre-mined tokens of steemit Inc should not have voting rights, but can only be used for ecosystem development, and announced that steemit will be upgraded to version 0.22.2 soft fork, although the soft fork version is reversible It will not affect the operation of nodes, but this version will freeze all pre-mined tokens, which can completely limit Justin Sun's control over the network.
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Community freezing turned into "hacking"?
Conflict is a collection of conflicts between stakeholders, and the intensity of conflicts also determines the boundaries of conflicts.
Although an open letter was issued to appease the witnesses of the Steem network, Justin Sun, who has been in the ups and downs of the industry for several years, obviously will not sit still. According to a statistical table in the steemit community, Binance, Huobi and Poloniex participated in the witness voting on March 2, and a total of more than 42 million steem Power was gathered, including 31.7 million for Binance and 800 for Huobi. Ten thousand, Poloniex 2.2 million.
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Justin Sun controlled a large number of votes and replaced the top 20 witnesses
After taking full control of the Steem network, Justin Sun immediately issued a series of statements. Said that the order of the Steem blockchain has been restored. This action is only to retrieve the STEEM legally held by the foundation, correct the "wrong decision" in the 0.22.2 soft fork version, and defend the decentralization of the Steem blockchain. The sacred principle of the inviolability of private property rights.
But Sun Yuchen also believes that the 0.22.2 soft fork is malicious. He confirmed twice to the lawyer and was told that it was a "criminal act of hacking". Hard forks destroy assets. And this behavior will put the interests of every STEEM holder at risk.
Justin Sun said that controlling the network in a short period of time is a "last resort" choice. He has no intention of controlling or affecting the entire Steem blockchain, and will not integrate the Steem blockchain with the community without discussion and unification. Tron blockchain merger. All witness votes will be withdrawn as soon as possible when it is determined that malicious hackers are no longer disrupting the Steem network and voting rights are returned to the community.
A series of changes in the Steem network have caused uneasiness among witnesses, developers, and currency holders. In addition to some users starting to unlock and prepare to sell, witnesses and developers have also shut down DApps in protest. Currently, it is known that Steemwallet, Steemapps, smartSteem, Steemauto, Steemsql, Steemengine, etc. have stopped their services.
Not only that, Steemit team members have also resigned:
Andrarchy, former director of Steemit Communications, announced his resignation from related positions...
Gerbino, the former steemit blockchain engineer, announced his resignation...
Vandeberg, the original steemit blockchain engineer, announced his resignation...
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Community Doubts and DPoS Dilemma
“Apparently, the Delegated PoS model (DPoS) of the Steem network was taken over by a large exchange with user-escrowed funds. This seems to be a classic case of token voting “buying attacks”,” Ethereum founder Vitalik said on Twitter.
Faced with Vitalik's doubts, Binance founder Zhao Changpeng and Binance Exchange, which had the largest voting power in Sun Yuchen's "voting to seize power" process, were pushed to the cusp of public opinion. Under the questioning of users, Changpeng Zhao gave an explanation about this incident. He admitted that he knew about the incident, but explained that he thought it was a regular soft fork upgrade so he supported it; If the governance is not interested, it will be neutral.
When asked whether he had benefited from the vote, Changpeng Zhao denied it, emphasizing again that he thought it was just a routine upgrade. Given the feedback from the community, Binance also started withdrawing its own votes.
Although the voting rights have been withdrawn, the disadvantages of large exchanges controlling the entire blockchain system have emerged. The EOS network, which also uses the DPoS mechanism like Steem, has once again aroused heated discussions in the community. Compared to Sun Yuchen who owns 20% of steemit tokens and corresponding voting rights, Block.one also owns nearly 1 billion EOS tokens, which will also have an important impact on the selection of super nodes.
In this regard, Block.one CEO Brendan Blumer explained on Twitter: Block.one has no potential control over EOS tokens. Block.one currently owns less than 9.7% of the EOS tokens in the entire network, while the top 21 Supernodes have more than 30% voting rights in total, and Block.one cannot affect a single BP.
It is worth mentioning that PANews has conducted statistics before. Among the top 21 supernodes with the highest vote rate in the EOS network, exchanges accounted for 7 of them, with a total vote rate of 20.57%.
A turmoil exposed the risks of public chain governance, and in the final analysis, it is still a conflict of interests.
