Binance Reluctantly Supports Controversial Steem Network 0.23 Upgrade

In an announcement published on Saturday, Binance revealed its decision to initiate the protocol upgrade on its platform — backtracking on its earlier stance against the hard fork.st The Steem hard fork of May 21 saw more than 23 million STEEM (~$5 million) belonging to community members in support of the Hive network, frozen. Hive itself is a hard fork of the Steemit protocol initiated by participants opposed to Tron CEO Justin Sun’s apparent interference in the project. According to Binance, the freezing of the $5 million in STEEM constituted an act of censorship, hence its previous decision to not honor the upgrade request. However, by failing to sync with the latest Steem network upgrade, Binance revealed that token owners have been unable to transact with their coins on the platform. For this reason, the Binance is reluctantly supporting the protocol upgrade with a proviso stating:

As a further response to the above, Binance plans to reduce STEEM trading pairs from the current 3 pairs down to 1 pair over the next two months.

In another twist to the tale, the coins frozen in the hard fork ended up on Bittrex. The unknown entity responsible for the transfer has instructed the crypto exchange to return the funds to their original Steem account owners before the fork.