What happened with STEEM’s Hive fork, according to Justin Sun

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Written on May 1, 2020

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TRON's Justin Sun recently attended Virtual Blockchain Week, where he spoke of the Steem incident.
Sun said that Tron's relationship with Steemit was more of a partnership than acquisition.
However, his attempt to remove Steem node operators with Binance and Huobi remains a major controversy.

TRON (TRX) founder and CEO, Justin Sun, recently spoke at the Virtual Blockchain Week (VBW). During the event, Sun gave his view of events that included STEEM hard fork that eventually became the project Hive.

As some may remember, these events took place rather recently, although it still remains unclear what happened. Now, Sun decided to come forth with his version of events.

What is known, however, is that Sun managed to acquire Steemit Inc about two months ago, in February. He also acquired the platform’s founder’s reward, including 20% of STEEM’s total supply. This did not sit well with the Steem community, which attempted to freeze the reward through a hard fork.

Sun sees things differently

According to Sun, he does not agree with this view. He does not even agree that the term ‘acquisition’ is adequate to describe what happened with Steemit. He, instead, sees it as a partnership between the platform and the Tron Foundation.

“At the beginning, we didn’t use the word acquisition, we more talk about partnership,” he said.

He further explained the relationship by saying “Steemit Inc take a certain percentage of the tokens inside of the Steemit ecosystem, and also Steemit.com is one of the most important apps in the ecosystem.“

As an example, he said that “Bitcoin, like Steem, is definitely decentralized, but [some] of the companies, they hold lots of the Bitcoin. So that’s the relationship between the company and the Steem blockchain.”

However, he did admit that Steemit does hold some influence over Steem blockchain.

Another controversy sticks to Sun’s name

Another issue that many hold against Sun is his collaboration with Binance and Huobi in March. He allegedly worked with the two to oust the project’s former node operators. This led to reports of a hostile takeover of the project.

The exchanges were quick to withdraw and wash their hands of the move. They claimed that they were not aware of the fact that their actions supported the removal of node operators. This incident is what led to the creation of the Hive hard fork.