Hive and Blurt: Forks of the Steem blockchain

Hive blockchain | Blurt blockchain

Steemit, Inc. is a privately held company which is/was based in the United States (maybe now in Singapore) and responsible for running the Steemit community application at Steemit.com as well as participating in the development of the Steem blockchain.

On or about February 14, 2020 Ned Scott (then owner of Steemit, Inc) sold Steemit, Inc. to Justin Sun (or Sun's Tron Foundation):

A substantial number of Steemians weren't happy with the sale. Sun then took measures to take over the Steem blockchain itself. Steemains soon forked the Steem blockchain naming it Hive. Holders (aside from Sun's account) of Steem tokens were credited with the same number of Hive tokens.

More about Hive can be found at Hive.io. Their most popular web app (as Steemit was for Steem) is Hive.blog. Hive is also listed at Coinmarketcap (market price at time of this report is $0.25 USD).

Justin Sun declared that free speech, dissent and support for other chains was criminal activity and would not be tolerated. Sun appropriated or stole Steem tokens from dissenters by way of hard fork.

Coindesk covered these and closely related events (including actions which took place at the Binance Exchange, Houbi Exchange and statements made by Changpeng Zhao (aka "CZ). Articles published include, though may not be limited to, the following:

• Why Crypto Should Care About Justin Sun's Steem Drama (March 2, 2020 by Brady Dale)
• Steem Hard Forks Today Over Fears of Justin Sun Power Grab (March 20, 2020 by Sebastian Sinclair)
• Steem Hard Fork Confiscates $6.3M, Community Immediately Takes It Back (March 20, 2020 by Paddy Baker)
• Binance CEO Says Steem Too Centralized but Exchange Must Support Controversial Hard Fork (March 25, 2020 by Daniel Palmer)

Another group of Steemians have planned to fork away Steem next month on or before July 4, 2020. The chain will be named Blurt. Apparently all accounts (not sure about Sun's or the current Steem witnesses) will be credited with Blurt tokens (and there will not be Blurt dollars so Steem dollars will be credited as Blurt tokens too) based on Steem account balances from Steem block 43526969 (last month , May 20, 2020).

It appears that downvoting content will not be a feature at Blurt and that content created on the Steem blockchain will not be imported. Account balances (as referenced in the foregoing) will be imported.

At their GitLab account they also state that, Blurt will likely move to another consensus protocol at some point during those two years, and the leading candidate for the new consensus is the Cosmos-SDK.

More about Blurt can be found at gitlab.com/blurt/blurt#blurt

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