The Steem community is striking back after an attempted end-around by Tron founder Justin Sun.
While CoinDesk has been writing this report, four former Steem blockchain validators (known as "witnesses”) have been voted back onto the council of 20 nodes that keeps Steem running.
Steem validators tell CoinDesk that by hitting four validators it is no longer possible for the Tron Foundation to launch a contentious hard fork to change the economic rules governing STEEM tokens.
On Monday, Sun was able to put a new slate of witnesses in charge after a contentious soft fork limited his voting power.
Sun acquired the popular Steemit app and its large share of STEEM tokens on Feb. 14. Referring to the tokens that were effectively frozen in a community-led soft fork following the Steemit acquisition, he wrote on Twitter Tuesday:
"#STEEM has successfully defeated the hackers & all funds are super #SAFU."
Steemit resignations
Steemit has become a small company – and it's rapidly getting smaller.
In the last 24 hours, four employees have quit: Andrew Levine, head of communications; Steve Gerbino, a developer; Tim 
Similarly, when the Tron Foundation acquired BitTorrent, that company also saw a rash of employee exits and a subsequent lawsuit.
Steemit initiated a restructuring in November 2018, after announcing on YouTube it would lay off 70 percent of its employees. Last year Steemit published an update on the restructuring, listing six staff members who represented its leadership. The list included Levine and Vandeberg.
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.
Watch the votes
As the backing for Tron's witnesses recedes, the backing for the old witnesses is growing.
The first two witnesses who returned to top slots today were part of the group that enacted the soft fork. As of this writing, @Yabapmat has over 10,000 voters (or, more accurately, wallets) supporting his role and 
Additionally, the gap in votes between the new witnesses supported by the Tron Foundation and those supported by the community has shrunk dramatically. The Tron-backed witnesses are losing votes (likely from exchanges unstaking STEEM as they announced they would) and the old slate of witnesses is gaining. It's gone from a big difference to a tiny one.
The broader crypto community has generally been supportive of the Steem community. For example, 1confirmation's Nick Tomaino tweeted, "The Steem situation also shows you can’t buy a community, you have to earn it."
Still, some remain skeptical of its underlying structure. Dovey Wan of Primitive Ventures tweeted, "The hostile take over of $STEEM only tells you how hypocritical SUN is and why DPOS as a consensus layer is non-resilient."
But STEEM holders haven't given up on their blockchain. Matt Rosen, a co-founder of the Steem-based game Splinterlands, runs a witness (with @Aggroed) that served for a long time in the top 20. That witness was the first to break through to the top 20 again following yesterday's events. He told CoinDesk in an email:
Witness 
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