• Binance and Huobi announced that they will support the hard fork of the Steem blockchain initiated by the Hive team. 
• The exchanges will distribute the new HIVE tokens for the STEEM token holders.

The crypto exchanges Binance and Huobi announced that they will support the hard fork of the blockchain Steem. According to the announcements of each exchange, the hard fork was initiated by the Hive.io team and is scheduled for 2:00PM (UTC) on March 20, 2020.

The hard fork is the latest event in TRON CEO Justin Sun’s saga against the Steem community. On February 14th, Sun announced the purchase of the Steemit content platform. Initially, the acquisition was intended to strengthen the progress of decentralized technologies and create a better experience for Steemit users.

However, the Steem community claimed that in his statements, TRON’s CEO spoke of Steem as if the blockchain had been part of the Steemit sale. According to the community, Steem is a decentralized blockchain that cannot be sold or acquired by a single entity.

Tensions increased when the Steem community tried to activate a soft fork that was intended to deprive Justin Sun of ownership of an estimated 20% of all Steem tokens that were pre-mined by Steemit Inc. These tokens were given to Sun as part of the Steemit purchase.

Later, TRON CEO used his influence with major exchanges to prevent the fork. Exchanges that had funds from Steem users, Binance, Huobi and Poloniex took their clients’ funds and voted for TRON-related accounts as witnesses in the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS). In this way, the former block producers chosen by the Steem community were overthrown.

Binance participation in the blockchain Steem takeover

A few days ago, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao confirmed his participation in the takeover of the Steem blockchain. Zhao said he was not aware of all the details and thought he was voting for a “regular update”. At that point, Binance and Huobi withdrew their support for Justin Sun completely.

Now, Binance and Huobi are taking similar steps to support the hard fork of the Steem community. The hard fork aims to move Steem’s platform to a new blockchain and leave the one controlled by Sun abandoned. The new version will be hosted by Hive.io.

In addition to the support given by the exchanges to the hard fork, Binance and Huobi announced that they will be distributing the HIVE token to the STEEM token holders. For this reason, the exchanges will take a snapshot of all STEEM tokens hosted on their platforms. The snapshot will be taken in the block before the hard fork.

In addition, the exchanges announced that the HIVE tokens will be distributed in a radius of 1 STEEM = 1 HIVE. Users should be aware that withdrawals and deposits with the STEEM token will be suspended as of 1:30PM (UTC) on March 20th. Withdrawals and deposits will resume once the successful activation of the hard fork is confirmed. However, users will still be able to trade STEEM within the platforms during the hard fork.

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