Blockchain Social Platform Steemit Completes Hardfork
The community requested hardfork to enforce change with the Steemit blockchain’s economic model has been completed successfully, the social news platform confirmed today.
First revealed toward November’s end, Steemit CEO Ned Scott revealed that plans for a hardfork were put in place to address the inflation rate incurred by its token coin Steem and to encourage participation from short or mid-term investors rather than an over-reliance on early adopters.
“The hard fork request was initiated by the community, and once we reiterated the recommendations, we received an overwhelmingly positive response,” said a Steemit press release in November.
Speaking to CCN.com about the hardfork at the time, Scott stated:
The change [hard fork] has to do with a change of the financial aspects of the platform. The community has asked us to try a new iteration of the experiment. It will be interesting to have the changes implemented.
And so it came to pass within a fortnight of the original announcement. All 19 top witnesses have since upgraded to Steemit version 16.0, accepting and implementing the hard fork.
“The hardfork, which drew unanimous community approval, saw the inflation rate of the Steem token reduced and the Steem Power holding requirements curtailed from an average of one year to an average of one and a half months,” a Steemit press release read today.
With the hardfork, Steemit claims that all Steem holders will see increased liquidity of their tokens while insisting that the allocation of new Steem tokens toward creators, witnesses and content producers will not change, sticking to the original figure at 9.5% of Steem tokens. Of the new fixed instantaneous annual creation rate of 9.5%, Steemit Power holders will receive 15%, as 10% will be allocated to witnesses and miners and 75% toward authors and content creators.
The hardfork and the ensuing shift to a new protocol and rules hasn’t impacted any functionality of the website nor its currency tokens, Steem Dollars.
Steem is currently the eighth in the biggest cryptocurrencies by market capital, with a market capital of $43.6 million, according to CoinMarketCap.
That figure is a long way from its July highs where it scaled toward a market cap of $344 million, figuring as the third largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Image from Shutterstock.
