It is actually good that the Steem whales are powering down. They give away a bit of their influence to get monetary rewards for their work. So the whole ecosystem becomes more sustainable.

Even if you don't agree with me, there are many things more important than the "powering down" of the Steem whales. Steem will succeed if the developers decide to make it fully open source and change that infamous "no forking" license to MIT or GPL. If you have fear of clones, then very probably you have something to hide. It would be also important to make Steem a website-agnostic system, by providing "buttons" for every website that wants to use it as a monetization model.