93 Days Dark: 8chan Coder Explains How Blockchain Saved His Troll Forum

"We are at the forefront of the deplatforming war and developing tools and techniques that other websites can use when they too get deplatformed," Ron Watkins, an 8chan admin, told CoinDesk.

"Unlike other platforms that have faced controversy for banning relatively innocuous speech, 8chan features a full commitment to the promise of the First Amendment," site owner Jim Watkins, told the House Committee on Homeland Security in a closed-door session on Sept. 4.

While the clearnet, or publicly available, version of the site is down intermittently, and unlikely to survive an onslaught of continued compromising attacks, Watkins described a strategy to rebuild 8chan through decentralized workarounds instead of relying on consolidated services that become unusable in the face of controversy.

In 2018, when 8chan was still alive and alternately horrifying or thrilling people, Watkins and Brennan began developing a blockchain solution that would become known as susucoin.

Prior to 8chan's deplatforming, Jim Watkins implemented a "King of the Shekel" feature on the website, which enabled users to pay in susu to promote their posts.

"Whatever is written into the blockchain will stay there and there is no easy way to remove anything short of a hard fork," Watkins said.

Despite this, Watkins doesn't see susu as an abject failure and is looking at how to integrate the blockchain into Project Odin.

As 8kun's lights flickered on for the first time Saturday, Watkins told Twitter followers that the new rollout would take a few days to become stable.

"The risk is that if we cannot defend against the attack then our presence will be on and off until we figure out how to defend it," Watkins said.

Through this process, Watkins has begun to doubt that blockchain technology can save free speech, let alone save 8kun.