I know that blocktrades knew because of his shares in Steemit, he even told me in a comment. It doesn't matter what the motives are, the truth is that hive is less reliant on blocktrades now that it was reliant on Steemit.

Steemit had a huge stake. And they were selling more dollars just for node costs than the DAO is printnig now. At least blocktrades made node run 8x cheaper.

Hive is simply better now, don't know why you get sucked into weird guesses. If you don't trust blocktrades then fine, I can see why. I personally think he really wants to implement on hive his vision of a huge reputation system, which I am not a fan of honestly.

But hive will be successful even without that.