HIVE

After Tron completed its purchase of Steemit in Feb. 2020, Steem witnesses (akin to validators) voted to remove the governance rights from Tron's newly acquire STEEM tokens as a "protective measure." Tron reportedly retaliated by coordinating enough support to reverse these governance restrictions. The concerns over network centralization pushed the Steem community to move to a new chain free of any Tron influence.

Former Steem developers completed a hard fork of the Steem blockchain on Mar. 20, 2020, to launch the new Hive network. Hive contained all of the data, including Steemit blog posts, previously deployed to the Steem network, giving any Steem-based projects the option to port their operations over to Hive without losing any data.

The split also created a new token called HIVE, which now serves as the native token of the Hive network. As part of the fork, Hive airdropped HIVE tokens (as well as Hive Dollar, the Hive equivalent of a Steem Dollar) to all existing Steem accounts; all except for those associated with the so-called "ninja-mined stake" that initially belong to Steemit Inc. Hive developers wanted to prohibit Tron from having a stake in the new network and, therefore, cut the Tron Foundation out of HIVE distribution process.

The new chain also featured an update to Steem's on-chain governance system that requires users to lock-up their tokens for 30 days before they can participate in governance votes. This governance change aims to discourage attacks on the network like the one Tron reportedly attempted when trying to reverse previous governance decisions.