Binance, the world’s leading crypto exchange, has today published a letter of apology addressed to the STEEM community. The cause of his apologies is for participating in the “hostile acquisition” of the Blockchain.
Many are probably wondering: “What happened?” Well, in mid-February, the Tron Foundation, belonging to Justin Sun, acquired the Steemit platform. However, many of their community members were not satisfied with their new owner.
It is worth bearing in mind that the Steem Blockchain runs on a “delegated proof-of-stake” (dPoS) system. This implies that the people who secure the network, called “witnesses”, are collectively approved by the “Steem stakeholders”. This means that those who have more tokens are those who have the most power to vote.
In this way, the community decided to make a soft fork, with the aim of preventing Tron from taking over the network. However, after that, Sun was accused of cooperating with major crypto exchanges, including Binance, to remove previously chosen validators; then allowing the CEO of Tron to govern the network for himself.
Recall that the greatest voting power resides in those who maintain greater amounts of Steem. However, customers store these tokens in crypto exchanges, making them the largest token holders in the network.
Obviously, this generated an important controversy within the crypto world. Since then, all the parties that voted pledged to reverse the votes. Although this did not go as planned, because of the rage, caused the resignation of several prominent Steemit employees.
Zhao also said that if it is not “a unanimous update of the network, we do not want to use our users’ funds to participate in a vote.”
“Justin didn’t really tell me about that. My internal team said it was a necessary network update, so I told him to move on. There are network updates all the time and we always provide support“Said Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance.
Sincere apologies to the Steem community!
A letter to the Steem community was published today, stating that “Binance remains neutral and has no interest in on-chain governance beyond the Binance ecosystem“.
Binance also said that it was an error caused by the lack of communication about the details of the Blockchain update. In addition, he notes that, after receiving comments from the Steem community, they have withdrawn their vote.
The letter also emphasizes their desire for the Steem and Tron community to reach consensus efficiently. If this is not the case, Binance reserves the right to take the corresponding measures in case of posing risks or potential damages.
In addition to Binance, Huobi also announced that he eliminated his vote, while Poloniex has not yet issued any comments.
