Vitalik Buterin termed the incident a ‘watershed moment’ in the blockchain history when Steem hard-forked to generate Hive blockchain on 20th March’20. The community split also happened but conflicts remained intact between the two communities. Steem hard fork 23 took place on 20th May’20. It reduced power down from 13 weeks to four weeks and seized 23.6 million Steem from selected Steem accounts. The reason for the seizure was the so-called ‘threat to the network’ as declared by Justin Sun camp. The seized fund was sent to ’community321’ account. The drama continued as an unknown entity got access of the fund from ‘community321’ account and send it to Bittrex. That huge amount of Steem is with Bittrex now in an unclaimed status. Many exchanges had to support the fork with reluctance for saving investor interest. CZ Binance was a stakeholder in the Steem saga since the beginning. He said that he was against nullifying or seizure of people’s asset but suggested to make another Steem fork. CZ assured that Binance would be supporting it. I was a bit astonished as the chain split already took place during the generation of Hive. But it seems that the idea caught the attention of some people.
CZ Binance's tweet and my response that time
An assurance from a top exchange to support a new fork is good enough reason to fork a chain. It is easy and free money ultimately. A new project called ‘Blurt’ emerged to declare a fork but as per their twitter announcement, they made the decision before CZ Binance’s announcement to support any new Steem fork. Blurt has stated that they would launch a new chain and airdrop all Steem holders on 1:1 basis and the snapshot of the chain at block 43,526,969 (before HF23) has been already taken. Their twitter has only 247 followers. So I can guess that hardly people know about the new hard fork.
The official tweet of Blurt
As per the project’s Github details available, Blurt will begin to operate on or before 4th July’20. The features will be:
• Graphene DPOS just like Steem
• Removal of downvote function
• Elimination of stable coin in the system
• Real REST API
• A regent account system with controlling stake has been added to Blurt
• The regent account will take part on governance and DAO proposals
• The regent account doesn’t impact the circulating supply, inflation or reward pool
• The regent account has been programmed to decay slowly after two years
• Before abolishing the regent account, the blockchain will apply one stake=one vote to minimize the risk of attack from large stakeholders
• Inflation will be 10% APR initially and it will get reduced to 1% over 20 years
You can check how many tokens you’ll get here. The list shows the eligible account names and Blurt balance which will be airdropped. I’m not sure who is behind this project. But you people are going to get free money. I guess we’ll get to see many more forks in near future. In DPOS, conflicts arise easily.
The Github link of Blurt: https://gitlab.com/blurt/blurt
Cheers!
[paragism]
Note: The images (if not cited) are created by the author using free vectors.