Justin Sun, who has an ambiguous reputation in the crypto community, became a figurant in another scandal - he decided to take charge of the Steem blockchain and use it for his purposes. That is how users of Steemit interpret his actions, a decentralized blogging platform similar to Reddit, which the enterprising Sun acquired at the end of February this year.
Related: What Are Steem and Hive?
The majority of Steem’s witnesses were crowd out by accounts presumably linked to Tron. As Steem uses DPoS, holders can vote for witnesses according to their quantity, who validate the transactions and create and write the blocks in the blockchain.
It turned out that major crypto exchanges, such as Binance, Huobi, and Poloniex, have used their high voting power through a large number of tokens and delegated their votes to Sun’s accounts.
In response to the accusations, Justin Sun said that he was acting exclusively in the interests of the network - so he intended to protect it from hackers and thereby save it.
In May, Steem implemented a 0.23 hard fork with the significant codename "New Steem," with the participation of some of the platform's ex witnesses and stakeholders who formed a splinter group called HIVE out of the ecosystem.
Hive became the basis of the Peakd platform.
The developers of the fork have duplicated the blockchain, which contains copies of all blog posts created on Steem to date. That means that despite the move and the hard fork, all blog data is preserved. Other decentralized blogging apps have an opportunity to redirect a copy of the data to the new blockchain.
The fork brought with it three significant modifications:
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The power-down period was 13 weeks in previous now it has been reduced to 4 weeks; Updated the documentation and other key related materials necessary for the platform security and gained network stability; The New Steem took over some user accounts that have been involved in illegal activity, actively participating in the menace against the Steem blockchain and/or the theft of STEEM holders' assets.
You can read more about these two networks and their features here: What Are Steem and Hive?