Poloniex Stellar Lumens users in problem, bitcoin users affected
Stellar Labs are having a twitter war with Poloniex. It is about their ongoing program where they used to be giving free Lumens currency to people who already hold bitcoin. Under their scheme, users who hold bitcoin in kraken, BTC38, Poloniex, deribit, Bit-Z, NaoBTC and Yuanbag. Poloniex said that it was not clear to them why Stellar included their name on their website as participants in 6/27 giveaway. This was done without their consent and they did not agree to participate nor did they possess the Stellar Labs for this giveway.
Stellar Labs responded by saying that it was their understanding that poloniex was indeed participating. They are confirming with them.
So why were they giving away free Lumens? They said they were doing this in order to achieve more inclusive digital economy. The availability and active use of lumens on the network will increase the network’s utility by many orders of magnitude.
So if you had bitcoins in your wallet on any of those exchanges, except poloniex, you do not need to take any action and you are entitled to get free Lumens. If you are a Poloniex user, you won’t get any.
BTW, here is another twist to the story. A reddit user who also works at Stellar says,
Poloniex told Stellar they will participate. If they changed their mind it’s not really Stellar’s fault. Also, Poloniex is the only exchange that doesn’t want to rename STR to XLM (Lumens). Maybe they feel threatened by the built in distributed exchange on Stellar and want to limit the user experience. Who knows what exactly happened? I trust more Stellar than an exchange that’s every other day unavailable, doesn’t answer support tickets for weeks, blocks withdrawals without any communication, is investigated by law enforcement for inside trading.