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Steem Hardfork: 65 Accounts to Lose 5 Million, Crying Foul of a “Hostile Takeover”

- 65 Steemit Users to lose approximately $5 million in scheduled Steem Hardfork
- Hardfork scheduled for May 20, 2020, to cut out malicious hackers and move on
- Affected members file lawsuit against hardfork
Sixty-five Steemit users stand to lose their STEEM investment amounting to 5 Million, after the Steem Hardfork is carried out on May 20, 2020. This is following allegations of intentional sabotage during and after the recent HIVE hardfork that resulted in Hive Blockchain.
The affected users have come out to resist the verdict carried out by new Steem witnesses, claiming that this is a power play by Justin Tron to centralize the Steem blockchain further.
STEEM’s blockchain troubles started when TRON CEO Justin Sun acquired the social blogging platform in December 2019. This has since ignited lots of drama resulting in a soft fork, a takeover, a hardfork, another soft fork, and now, the current hardfork.
Hostile Takeover: Users Reach out to the Blockchain Community for Help
On Twitter, one of the affected Steemit users who stands to lose €80,000 wrote:
“They accuse all of us of criminal activity, without presenting any proof.”
He goes on to tag influential names in the crypto space inducing Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin and the key exchanges that have been involved in the Witnesses removal drama since the beginning.
“I would love to see a statement by @binance, @cz_binance, @HuobiGlobal, @CiaraHuobi, @BittrexExchange, and other exchanges listing Steem. I used your services to buy crypto, will you support a fork that takes them away from me?”
In its statement, however, the Steem Consensus Witness said the hardfork is necessary to weed out trouble makers, wrap up and move on from the events that started before the Hive Hardfork.
“The Steem blockchain has been under constant attack from malicious accounts, and this has heavily influenced user experience, Dapp’s usability, and the stability of the chain itself.”
Involved Exchanges Have the Final Say
Justin Sun acquired the Steemit blog, which holds a majority of the STEEM cryptocurrency in December 2019. The Steemit community started to protest, which led to Steem Witnesses (validators) to initiate a soft fork, on February 22, 2020, to “freeze out the original stakes owned by Steemit.Inc.”
TRON claimed that the fork was maliciously structured and targeted a few accounts to take away their Witness rights and their STEEM assets. The fork was reversed on March 2, 2020, and Steemit regained the staked accounts. Justin Sun stated that the move was to protect the sanctity of private property from malicious hackers.
On the same day, claims arose that the reverse was a hostile takeover that had been aided by some centralized exchanges which used their user deposits as stakes to vote.
Binance, Poloniex, and Huobi were accused of mobilizing their customers to vote against existing Steem Witnesses and will also be the ones to approve the current hardfork.
Black Listed Steemit Users to File a Class Action Lawsuit and Migrate to Hive
Another affected user, @dev365, refers to the March event as the hostile takeover which the current witnesses are using to remove all those rightfully involved in protesting it unjustifiably.
The user has already filed a class-action lawsuit to stop Steem from implementing the hardfork claiming it is theft of crypto assets and urging affected users to send the copy to the involved exchanges.
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