Justin Sun Bought Steemit. Steem Moved to Limit His Power

STAND BACK: Justin Sun's Gucci sneakers on stage at the first NiTron Summit in San Francisco, January 2019.The people who run the Steem blockchain executed a reversible soft fork Sunday, stopping one of the largest piles of tokens from voting.

"In these early stages the most important task for witnesses is to ensure the security of the Steem blockchain. To this end, we have updated to a temporary protective protocol to maintain the status quo currently established in regards to Steemit Inc's stake and its intended usage."

Steemit's holdings have always been a source of tension between Steem and Steemit, but as long as co-founder Ned Scott ran Steemit, the community felt relatively comfortable that he would not intervene in governance.

The move prompted a response from Sun, who wrote Sunday night, "We have so much to work to do to make Steemit.com the power that it really can be." He went on to list plans for incorporating Tron's various cryptocurrencies, getting STEEM tokens onto more exchanges and getting influencers onto the blogging site.

Steemit relies on Steem to track its users and also assess their clout on its network.

Steem has three different tokens: Steem, Steem Power and Steem Dollars.

Steem Power is created when users agree to lock up Steem, and it functions sort of like an ownership stake on the network.

What makes Steem challenging is that you never really know how much Steem Power there is in the world.

According to a longtime Steem community member, James Reidy, there are 210 million Steem Power in existence that could potential govern the chain.

Reidy estimated that Steemit controls something like 68 million in Steem Power, "But exact numbers are not known because they could have Steem and Steem Power in any number of unknown accounts," he told CoinDesk.