Steemit Inc and the Tron Foundation announced that they will be partnering to move Steemit to the TRON blockchain. What’s not clear is whether the Tron Foundation acquired Steemit or simply invested in it and providing strategic support.
We’ve previously brushed on Steemit when discussing DTube, which is Steemit’s answer to YouTube. Steemit is a blockchain-based social media platform that rewards creators as well as “curators” who upvote their content.
A press representative referred to it as “a partnership move to scale Steemit operations.” However, that representative also denied that the Tron Foundation invested at all in Steemit: “No, Steem chose to move to the TRON blockchain and the two will launch a joint accelerator to promote more development of the Steemit platform.”
The official statement from Steemit was: “A mutual agreement was made on both sides involving Steemit’s future and more than money, Steemit required the infrastructure and community support of a scalable network that only TRON provides.”
All these statements seem more or less in line. Where they fall apart is Ned Scott’s Twitter feed. The Steemit co-founder posted shortly after the announcement that he “sold Steemit to Justin Sun.”
https://twitter.com/realNedScott/status/1228364811622322178
Sun has not commented on that situation specifically, but he did hint at the upcoming announcement earlier this week during a podcast: “We are backing the projects but we are not the person to lead those projects.” When asked if Steemit is among those projects, Sun said yes.
“And also of course Steem, like we haven’t said anything about Steem yet. So, it’s all, like, in commercial, like, discussion. We haven’t, like, released any news,” he continued.
In a written statement, Sun wrote:
“Today, TRON joins forces with the Steem community & Steemit. We are so excited about this collaboration and value the voice of this thriving community.
By committing a meaningful percentage of the STEEM token, TRON now aligns the same interests with the Steem community, to bring the value to STEEM token, to keep the core value of decentralization, to grow a one-of-a-kind decentralized social media platform.
Steem community and Steemit team have been pioneering the decentralized social media initiative and now with this strategic partnership, together we have more resources, capital and bandwidth to make this goal achievable.”
Steemit is one of many recent attempts to dethrone the internet giants in favor of a decentralized, blockchain-based Web3.0 approach.
It remains to be seen how well these alternatives will fare and if they’ll reach the point of becoming a threat to the mass user base of the giants, but for now they’re certainly an interesting peek into what the future may hold for us in a world that isn’t controlled by Facebook, Google, Amazon and their collective trove of analytics.
