Hackernoon has just declared that it used its first blockchain-based feature on its publishing platform.

“We’re kicking off the year with the deployment of our first feature built on the blockchain: decentralized annotations and in-line comments. Overall, we will continue investing heavily in improving and iterating on the core product experience, reading, and writing, while also launching more curation tools,” Hacker Noon stated in an online post.

At the instant, Hacker Noon’s footnotes are in the beta phase. Annotations support the authors and the readers to attach meaning to stories in a user-friendly manner. Recently, the feature enables highlighting a story text on any page and submitting a note, comment, or annotation. Users can do this on their personal stories or someone else’s. The author can accept or reject the annotations.

CoinDesk published that annotations on Hacker Noon’s blog-style content would be hosted locally on the additional storage space of users. These annotations will be powered by GUN, a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) database system produced by ERA Inc.

ERA and Hacker Noon are currently working closely to roll out further blockchain feature integrations soon.

“Blockchain technology can distribute the hosting cost of running a site like ours, where people spend over 25 million minutes reading each month,” Hacker Noon CEO David Smooke said.

ERA CEO Mark Nadal told CoinDesk that the system was trialed last July and successfully serviced readers for 48 hours, proving that blockchain systems can be used both quickly and at scale.

Launched in 2016, Hacker Noon chose to leave Medium last year as its publishers were not satisfied because they did not have much control over the headline, advertisement, and URL reroutes. Smooke announced last March that Medium tried to buy out Hacker Noon for a small amount, which the team declined. Hacker Noon endured utilizing a crowdfunding campaign.

The CEO said they strived because “less dependency on central entities is essential for the internet to mature into a technology that works for the people using it.”