On Feb. 14, Sun’s Tron foundation acquired Steemit, Steem’s leading social media dapp and, it’s thought, its large hoard of steem tokens, which bring with them great voting power in the blockchain’s governance. With the community seeing this as a potential takeover by the crypto entrepreneur, they moved to limit his power with a soft fork in late February that was ultimately unsuccessful.
Major crypto exchanges Binance and Huobi have aligned behind a controversial hard fork of the Steem blockchain scheduled for Friday.
The blockchain split is the latest development in the ongoing dispute between Tron founder Justin Sun and the Steem community, who have been in a fight for control over who controls the social media and content-focused blockchain.
Sun claimed the move was brought by «hackers» at the time.
While Huobi and Binance previously supported Sun’s move to acquire Steem and used their token supply to back his moves, it would appear the exchanges have changed their stance. The firms now back the hard fork, which will port over steem tokens to the new chain, all but Sun’s sizable stash, that is. The move would exempt him from holding any of the new hive tokens and, thus, voting power on the new chain.
«We will take a snapshot of all STEEM tokens held by Binance users at the time of the final Steem block prior to 2020/03/20 2:00 p.m. (UTC) and will distribute HIVE tokens at a ratio of 1 STEEM = 1 HIVE,» Binance said in an announcement on Friday. Huobi made a similar statement Wednesday.
The new hive tokens will deny Sun control of the original development fund through his major share in Steem’s «ninja-mined stake» tokens – perhaps 20 percent of the total supply. As such, fork backers hope to completely remove Sun from the picture when the hard fork goes live in a couple of hours.
«The intention of this community-driven fork is to support and build on the strong Steem community values that have made our ecosystem so diverse and exciting,» said Hive. «This new direction steps away from the burden of the Steemit Inc. ninja-mined stake, which has impacted the long term ability to work towards further development and decentralization for years.»
Starbucks, McDonald’s Among 19 Firms to Test China’s Digital Yuan
Starbucks and McDonald’s are reportedly among 19 restaurants and retail shops that will be involved in testing China’s central bank digital currency in the country’s Xiong’An new district.The Reformation and Development Commission of the Xiong’An district in Hebei province reportedly convened a meeting on Wednesday regarding the rollout of a pilot for China’s digital yuan initiative, a local news outlet reported on Thursday, citing a government document.
The move signals China’s wider efforts to test out the digital currency project, with state-owned commercial banks already developing wallet applications for the digital yuan, also known as DC/EP.
The news outlet said the meeting involved representatives from government agencies, China’s four state-owned commercial banks, Ant Financial, Tencent, as well as 19 restaurants, entertainment and retail shops that will participate in the test.
Notable names include McDonald’s, Starbucks, Subway, JD Supermarkets in the area, among others. The report does not specify when the test would likely start or how long they’ll last.
CoinDesk has reached out to the government agency, but had not heard back at press time.
It was reported last week that the Agricultural Bank of China has already developed a test user interface for a DC/EP wallet that features how the digital yuan would be transacted.
The test application, initially available for download, also showed that the test was being rolled out in the cities of Chengdu, Suzhou, Shenzhen and the Xiong’An new district.
Another local news outlet reported last Thursday that the testing being rolled out in Suzhou involves issuing transportation allowances for local government officials in the form of digital yuan.
The People’s Bank of China confirmed last Friday the ongoing testing efforts and emphasized «it does not mean the digital yuan has been launched officially.»
