STEEM To Freeze $5 Million Worth Coins from User Wallets During Upcoming Hardfork

The upcoming hardfork of the Steemit (STEEM) blockchain network scheduled on May 20 could possibly see several users lose a total of 23.6 million STEEM coins valued at a $5 Million.

Recently, there’s been a huge controversy around Ton’s Justin Sun taking over the control of the Steem blockchain. With the upcoming hardfork Steem blockchain would likely freeze the funds of former Steemit witnesses and stakeholders.

Last year in December 2019, Justin Sun had bought the Steemit blogging platform and later took over the Steemit blockchain platform by February 2020. Well, it looks like the upgrade would crush all the stakeholders who opposed Sun’s controversial takeover of the platform.

However, there are two camps within the Steemit blockchain. Some of the network validators dubbed ‘witnesses’ who are with Sun have agreed this move to freeze funds. These witnesses have also accused the stakeholders of posing an existential threat to the Steem network.

But some critics said that this is a vindication against the stakeholders who opposed Justin Sun’s takeover and instead promoted Hive hard fork which would allegedly exclude Sun from the new network and freeze the rewards that Sun acquired alongside Steemit.

Clearing his position about the upcoming hardfork, Justin Sun tweeted: "First of all, both Steemit Inc. and I are not involved in this hard fork. However, I do have sympathy for current Steem witnesses and can see where they are coming from. The Hive witnesses took their assets away from them by force, causing huge losses to them.”

He further added: "I am not involved in this decision in any way, but as a member of the Steem community, I am entitled to my own opinions. Since Hive took the assets from the Steem witnesses, vitalik & the misleading media have been 100% supportive of it”.

The code for the upcoming hardfork also includes the name of those 64 accounts whose funds shall be frozen.

In a recent interview, the current Steemit witness Triple A has accused the previous stakeholders for spreading fake news. Triple A further added that the accounts for seizure belong to those persons who were, “Publicly attacking users, collecting personal information, threatening murder.”

Note that the Steemit blockchain runs a Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus model wherein the users can chose who they want to help to keep the network running by delegating their own coins as a ‘Witness’.

Just in the last 24 hours, the price of STEEM cryptocurrency has jumped 50% moving from $0.20 to above $0.30. At press time, STEEM is 36% up trading at $0.30 with a market cap of $76.5 million.