Hive Blockchain Launched, HIVE Coin Listed – Is Steem-Sun Battle Over?
The Hive blockchain, a hard fork of the Steem (STEEM) blockchain, has officially launched last Friday, as the new home for the Steem community, while the new coin has been listed by two exchanges so far. However, it’s yet to be seen if this will put a full stop on the Steem – Justin Sun battle.
As the Twitter account Hive.io announced on March 20, the Hive Blockchain is officially live, stating in a blog post that the “launch went incredibly smoothly given the pressure and effort involved in getting a hardfork ready in such a tight window.” The blog post added that another hard fork will be needed to upgrade Hive.
As promised, the new HIVE coin is already listed on two exchanges. Just a day after the launch, HIVE has been listed on Bittrex, while today the platform announced ProBit listing the coin as well. Additionally, Ionomy has full, limited-time, fee-free trading enabled, Hive says, while other exchanges that are planning on listing Hive are currently working on bringing their trading pairs online.
Furthermore, crypto exchange Binance has partnered with HIVE in the drop, says Hive, and the exchange said they would be “transferring HIVE to their customers once the were complete with their updates.” There are six more exchanges working on the airdrops, and some of them will also be listing the coin. Another post lists the exchanges supporting the hard fork and airdrop (in addition to other useful links), also naming Huobi, Bithumb, Upbit, KuCoin, GoPax, and the Binance-acquired India-based exchange WazirX.
At pixel time (10:27 UTC), Steem, ranked 63 by market capitalization, trades at c. USD 0.185 and is down 13% in a day, trimming its weekly gains to 61%. The price is down 13% in a month. HIVE trades at c. USD 0.192 and is up 10.5% in a day.
HIVE price chart:
Binance announced that it supported the Steem hard fork by the Hive team and will distribute the new HIVE token to users holding STEEM. However, “supporting this hard fork does not guarantee the listing of HIVE,” the exchange said, adding that the coin will go through their usual listing review process. As a reminder, Binance was one of the exchanges, along with Huobi and Poloniex, that were previously implicated in the voting war initiated by Tron’s Justin Sun, who acquired Steemit in February.
That acquisition led to the hard fork, as the Steem community had gotten worried that Sun would use a large pile of Steem tokens controlled by Steemit Inc, called the “ninja-mined stake,” to control the Steem blockchain – a fear they felt was further confirmed by the alleged censoring of Hive-related content. This pile wasn’t moved to Hive – therefore, Sun has no influence over the new blockchain.
Meanwhile, Hive has created a blacklist of their own. Per the Hive launch announcement, “the only accounts who will not be included in the initial airdrop are those containing the Steemit Inc ninja-mined stake, and those who actively contributed to (and publicly declared support for) the centralization of the Steem Blockchain,” though these can take part in the new chain. The so-called “HIVE AirDrop Exclusion List” includes Steemit accounts, “Tron puppets,” and others, stating that their “steem is treated the same” nonetheless.
Users have been testing the new blockchain from the moment of its launch, reporting successful and working elements, as well as issues they’re facing, with Hive assuring them that they are working out the kinks. “API’s are still coming up and we have high traffic, sites should regulate shortly,” they said on Twitter. “Hive came alive, slowly worked through the operations that needed to done, produced first blocks and transactions, and has been moving steadily ever since. No stalls or crashes, fast blocktimes, all good,” the blog post says.
All Steem account holders automatically got an account on Hive, under the same name, whereby each can choose which account to use, or use both. Either way, from the point of launch, as reported earlier, the accounts are independent from each other.
We have contacted the Tron Foundation for comment and will update should they reply.
