Good morning everyone,

a week of drama is slowly coming to an end. I think I have read and listed to everything - and the main problem in my view is, that from the TRON side, there is no consistent message - or at least not many.

After taking everything I know into consideration that I know by now, I think that the following has happened:

Justin Sun and the TRON Foundation ( hearing him speaking it sounds as if this is his personal investment vehicle and not a foundation in the sense we know it) have acquired Steemit Inc without much preparation. The rational to buy seemed easy: Create some hype around the cooperation, see the Steem price rising, sell of the Steem. Maybe - and I am speculating here in the same way this is all just speculation and not facts - he also planned to build a social media functionality on TRON and use the Steemit brand and website to run this - hoping to keep a large part of the Steem community.

After Soft Fork 0.22.2 this plan was made impossible by the witnesses, so Justin reacted to and used the exchanges to regain control. This was partly reversed when the community stroke back and managed to get 10 witnesses back into the top 10. This story is known to most of you, so I will not go into further details.

After this event, talks have started between the witnesses and Justin Sun and his responsible guy for business development, Roy Liu. Recordings of these discussions are available here and here and I would urge you to listen to these yourself. My key takeaways from these message are the following:

• Justin Sun does not plan to invest any money into the development of Steem
• Instead, he plans to sell of his stake as quickly as possible

Frankly speaking, this is not only breaking the given promise to use the steemit stake to develop the platform and help onboard new users, it is also a big risk to the Steem network:

• If Justin Sun sells an amount of 70m Steem on the market, the price will likely drop to levels not seen before as there is by far not enough demand to pick this up.
• Without a decent market cap we have no chance to keep developing by using the Steem Proposal System.
  In other words, I am afraid that this might be the death of Steem.

My proposal is thus the following:

We start a fair but tough negotiation with Justin Sun as quickly as possible. This should involve the witnesses - but not only the witnesses. The witnesses are elected to secure and run the chain - but they might not be the best experts for such negotiations. Bring some rational to the table and leave the emotions aside. While I can understand the hard feelings, it clearly does not help in the negotiations. I know that we have experts in the community which are business men and even investment bankers, which can assist in the negotiations.

I would start with two scenarios, which could be the starting point for a solution.

Scenario 1 - the compromise

The full stake of the accounts of @steemit and @misterdelegation will be transferred to the Steem Proposal System's account (@steem.dao). This money will be used for the intended purposes, inclding the funding of the furture development of the blockchain. All other funds, including those which are owned by the the accounts @ben and @ned as well as those funds at the exchanges, can be kept and sold. Like this, we would be sure that the funds are used for what they were intended to and that Justin Sund would never again be able to take too much influence on our witness election.

Scenario 2 - escalation

If no compromise can be reached, I would play it hard ball and fork out their whole stake. Most likely, the exchanges would come to their rescue - even if we managed to get a super majority of the witnesses. So this would most likely result in a hard fork with a chain split. The exchanges would most likely consider the TRON Steemy Steem the real deal - but I am convinced that the majority of the community would stick to the original Steem. Clearly, this is not my preferred scenario - but it might still be better than than the alternative. The support by the community has been overwhelming - this gives me hope that we could actually do a fresh start. This would also allow us make some changes to the rules, which I think would be beneficial for the Steem blockchain. These would in my view include a lower inflation - but this is another story.

I am still hoping for a compromise, but I would rather risk the chain split than continue working with a blockchain which is dominated by Justin Sun.

Have a nice weekend and let's see what happens next,

Tim