It's with a heavy heart that I too am going to say goodbye to Steem. This place has been my home for the last 4 years, and I've spent orders of magnitude more time online with this community than I have with those in the terrestrial space. I've done my best to "Save Steem," but I clearly underestimated Justin and what behaviors he finds acceptable.

I didn't think that he would collude with exchanges to over turn SF 22.2. I was wrong.
I didn't think that he would vote in sock puppet witnesses. I was wrong.
I didn't think that he would vote in human puppet witnesses. I was wrong.
I didn't think that he would blacklist content on Steemit. I was wrong.
I didn't think that he would blacklist authors let alone witnesses on Steemit. I was wrong.

To those with foresight of how he'd behave I commend you.

I don't support any of his actions or choices. I think he's bulldozed Steem. I think of my daughters carefully crafting castles with blocks and time and decorations, and my clueless infant son walking through and crashing it all. Like my daughters who then remove the infant and continue building, that's where I've landed as well. So, I'll build on Hive and I'll put my primary focus towards building on Hive.

There's going to be many that think it's taken me too long to arrive at this conclusion. I move slow. It's in the name Aggroed. It takes a lot to disturb me from the path that I'm on. So, to those that would have preferred faster action it's just not my way. But after steadily trying to reason with Steemit I don't see a positive pathway forward that makes any sense. So, after a month of Justin's reckless choices I just can't see it working here.

I've removed nearly all of my delegations on Steem, and will begin powering down my personal accounts completely. This includes my delegation to Justin. I did it to symbolize that I'd be willing to help him figure out a path that would work, but have rescinded it. I think he's impossible to work with. Fortunately, the majority of the active community is already gathering on Hive. I'll be joining them and focusing on building it.

What about Steem-Engine?

There's a fair number of questions of how to handle this, and I don't think there's any one answer that will satisfy everyone. Where I've landed after watching for a few days is that the infrastructure on Hive will be sufficient to create a "hive-engine." Mostly due to what I see as technical and legal challenges to porting things over from steem-engine I've decided instead to more or less start from scratch on Hive.

To do this I'll leave steem-engine running like it is now. In addition to running steem-engine I'm going to make and operate a hive-engine.

I suspect the new hive-engine will be operational in early April.

If you own a token on steem-engine you will have token names reserved by the same account on Hive for some time. That said you won't actually own the token. We're not porting things over. We're starting from scratch on Hive. Of all the reasons to do it this way I'm leading with legal consequences of trying to operate a dex in the USA. The decision may not be the most popular one, but I'm not going to risk an Ether Delta.

If you own a token or tribe on steem-engine and want to stay on steem there's nothing you have to do.

If you own a token or tribe on steem-engine and want to move to hive one option is to continue having your token live on steem-engine, but have payouts work with hive instead of steem for the base token.

If you own a token or tribe on steem-engine and want to move entirely to hive your token name will be reserved, you can get the token and make it stakable and delegatable, airdrop it as you see fit to users, and alter things around with your existing tribe.

This stuff is a work in progress. If it all goes smoothly I suspect we'll be done in April, but May and June are possibilities if we run into difficulties.

I would like to see the front end for the dex allow at least two markets for trading - Hive and Steem. I could see an additional one for a USD backed stable coin as well since I have an approved federal money transmitter registration. That's a little down stream though. What exactly it'll look like is still up in the air, but I hope to have trading pairs available for custom tokens on Hive one way or the other in April.

Splinterlands

After Hive-Engine exists it's easier to address Splinterlands. Splinterlands relies on trading of Dark Energy Crystals. There'd have to be a sensible way to trade the tokens on Hive if it was ever to move. After Hive-Engine is functional we can assess what else would be necessary to move Splinterlands as well and see if that makes sense for investors and card hodlers.