Binance Reverses Vote in Apparent Steem Takeover, Steemit Comms Head Resigns

On March 3, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced that the exchange had removed its votes that contributed to a sudden shift of control over the Steem blockchain.

Earlier today, leading exchanges Binance, Huobi, and Poloniex came under fire for allegedly mobilizing customer deposits to vote in what has been described as a hostile takeover of popular crypto blogging platform Steemit.

Steemit's native blockchain Steem uses a proof-of-stake protocol - where a small number of "Witnesses" are voted on to secure its network.

Votes are allocated according to the number of tokens that an individual holds in their wallet.

Justin Sun took to Twitter to reject "Misleading comments" regarding the takeover, stating that "All parties votes will be withdrawn."

The apparent coup was facilitated by Binance, Huobi, and Poloniex, who staked enormous numbers of STEEM tokens to vote in support of removing the previous witnesses.

The top five voters commanded 208,414 votes and represented 4 or 5 voters each.

"Apparently Steem DPOS got taken over by big exchanges voting with depositors' funds. Can anyone confirm and/or provide details? Seems like the first big instance of a 'de facto bribe attack' on coin voting".

The purchase prompted Steem's now-former witnesses to initiate a reversible soft fork to temporarily freeze Sun's tokens to prevent their use in voting.

On March 2, the new Steemit team announced that they would mobilize the tokens for voting to "Resume the order of the community," describing the fork as "Maliciously structured" and potentially illegal behavior "Led by a small group of people."