Three repositories. Three hours. One government order. Last week, GitHub silently removed three code repositories belonging to Bitchat — a decentralized messaging app linked to Jack Dorsey — after the Indian government invoked Section 69A of the Information Technology Act. The stated justification: the app was being used to coordinate communications during internet shutdowns in protest-hit regions. No court order was shown. No appeal was heard. Code simply vanished.
We don’t talk enough about how fragile our foundation really is.
This isn’t a story about a messaging app. It’s a story about the single point of failure that holds up the entire open-source movement — and by extension, every crypto project that claims to be “unstoppable.”
The Context: Bitchat and the Protest Economy
Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat emerged from the same philosophical soil as Bluesky: decentralized, anti-censorship, user-owned. The app leveraged peer-to-peer routing to bypass centralized servers, making it a natural tool for protesters facing state-ordered internet blackouts. In India, where the government has shut down internet access over 600 times since 2012, tools like Bitchat are not conveniences — they are lifelines.
Yet here’s the paradox that keeps me up at night: a project built to resist censorship was silenced not by blocking its protocol, but by taking down its code repository. The protocol itself likely still works for users who already have the client installed. But for anyone trying to discover, audit, or contribute to the project? They hit a 404 page. The attack surface wasn’t the blockchain; it was GitHub.
The bear market didn’t kill this project’s momentum. A takedown notice did.
The Core: Code as Infrastructure, GitHub as Gatekeeper
Let’s get technical — but let’s keep it human. When we say “decentralized,” we usually mean the network layer: no single server, no central authority. But what about the development layer? The vast majority of Web3 projects host their source code on GitHub, a centralized platform owned by Microsoft. The same platform that can and does comply with government takedown requests.
During my years auditing DeFi protocols, I’ve seen the numbers: over 90% of Ethereum-based projects use GitHub as their primary code repository. For Bitcoin L2s? The number is even higher. That means a single company — one company, one legal entity — can effectively remove the public face of a project in a few hours.
GitHub is not the problem. Our dependency on it is. The Indian government understood this better than most crypto advocates. They didn’t try to block Bitchat’s P2P traffic — they removed the source of truth. Without the repo, new contributors can’t join. Without the repo, security researchers can’t review code. Without the repo, the project becomes invisible.
Now, some will argue: “But the code can be forked! Users can distribute binaries via IPFS!” Yes, technically. But ask yourself: how many projects have a pre-established backup on Radicle or a Git mirror on a self-hosted server? In my experience, fewer than 5%. The rest trust GitHub’s uptime and legal resilience. That trust just got broken.
The Contrarian: This Event Is a Feature, Not a Bug
Here’s the angle that most analysts will miss: the Bitchat takedown is actually a positive signal for the Web3 movement. Why? Because it exposes the gap between our rhetoric and our infrastructure. We preach self-sovereignty while our code lives on a platform that can be served a takedown notice before lunch.
The real contrarian take is that this event will do more to accelerate decentralized code hosting than any whitepaper or conference talk ever could. Projects will now scramble to set up Radicle nodes, create IPFS snapshots, and maintain git mirrors on Tor. The cost of not doing so just became obvious.
I’ve been through bear markets. I watched projects with no revenue survive 2022 by cutting costs. This is different. This isn’t about survival of the fittest; it’s about survival of the decentralized.
The bear market didn’t teach us to cut fat; it taught us to eliminate single points of failure. GitHub was fat we didn’t know we had.
The Takeaway: Build for the World That Wants to Stop You
Every crypto project should ask itself one question tonight: “If our GitHub repo disappeared in three hours, what would we do?”
The answer can’t be “we don’t know” — because the answer is already happening in India right now.
About me: I’m Chris Thompson, a protocol PM based in Nairobi. I’ve spent the past five years building, breaking, and studying decentralized systems. I’ve seen the code that works and the code that fails. This takedown isn’t a failure of crypto; it’s a wake-up call for crypto’s infrastructure layer.
We don’t get to claim we’re building an unstoppable future while our foundations sit on a Microsoft server. The time to fork your repo is now — not when the next government order arrives.
