ARK Crypto Podcast #066 - Reacting to the Steemit Acquisition Story with Ray Alvarez and Dean Van Dugteren

The sixty-sixth episode of the ARK Crypto Podcast is here! This week, we have two guests on the podcast who have dropped in to say hi. Ray Alvarez, ARK.io Strategic Partnerships Manager, and Dean Van Dugteren, Founder and CEO of the nOS project building on ARK Core. We all get together and react to the recent news of Tron founder Justin Sun acquiring Steemit, Inc, the company behind a popular decentralized publishing platform running on the Steem blockchain, which is Delegated Proof of Stake (although operating differently than ARK). The story involves the Steem community disliking the move and Sun's intention to use team funds held by Steemit, Inc to vote for witnesses (Steem's version of delegates). The steem community of witnesses then froze those funds from voting, as there had been a previous agreement with the team of Steemit, Inc to refrain from voting with those funds. Sun then went to three major exchanges and convinced them to counteract that community move by powering up vote weight using exchange user funds to allow Sun to temporarily take over the network. The exchanges since went back on that decision upon learning more details about the actions taking place. Through an outpouring of support from the Steem community and beyond, community nodes regained network homeostasis. We react to these events in this episode and discuss implications for DPoS as a consensus mechanism. A special thanks to Ray and Dean for joining in on this episode! Enjoy!