Steem soft fork freezes $3.2M worth of tokens owned by HIVE users

As tensions between the Steem (STEEM) and the Hive (HIVE) communities continue to escalate, things seem to be going out of hand with the latest Steem soft fork. Steem has executed a soft fork to freeze around 20 accounts that belong to the network’s former witnesses. The accounts held around 17.6 million STEEM tokens that are worth nearly 3.2 million dollars. The sum represents five percent of the asset’s total supply.

Steem soft fork

The soft fork was proposed on April 4, in a Steemit post authored by user “softfork2288.” The post was created as a response to the “uncertain threat” that the heads and chief influencers of HIVE represented to the Steem blockchain.

The post suggested that accounts that meet three conditions should be frozen. The conditions were:

• Accounts that ran the version 0.23 during the Hardfork on Steem blockchain and were among the top 20 before the Hardfork.
• Accounts that proxied or directly voted for more than 10 witnesses that ran the 0.23 version on the blockchain during the hardfork with high influence.
• Accounts that were directly associated with the operations of these accounts.

As a result around 20 accounts were sanctioned by the Steem soft fork and 17.6 million STEEM was frozen.

The author stated that the soft fork requires community support in order to protect the Steem blockchain.

The post also took aim at the previous top witnesses of the Steem blockchain.  The user stated that half of the witnesses ran the “hostile version 0.23” of Steem prior to the hard fork. This move could have broken the Steem blockchain as the witnesses would no longer work for the Steem blockchain directly after the fork.   

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