4chan's founder Christopher Poole has announced that he is selling the popular messaging board to 2channel's owner Hiroyuki Nishimura. The Next Web reports Poole, also known as "moot" on 4chan, ran the site for 12 years, overseeing some 2 billion posts in that time.

Hiroyuki's textboard 2channel was created in 1999, and it inspired future anonymous message boards like 4chan. Poole says that if it weren't for Hiroyuki, there would be no 4chan and there might not be any anonymous message boards on the Internet at all.

4chan now sees over 20 million monthly users. The unique website has had no venture capital money and does not have a full time staff. The only way that the website was able to make money was through its 4chan "pass," which gave users extra features for $20 per month.

Poole said he met and befriended Hiroyuki in 2011. He said the two bonded over their mutual passion to create and manage online communities. Poole is confident that Hiroyuki is the perfect person to take over 4chan.

"Hiroyuki is literally the only person in the world with as much if not more experience than myself in running an anonymous, large destination community that serves tens of millions of people," Poole said in an interview. "He's the great-grandfather of all of this."

Poole retired as the sole administrator of 4chan earlier this year. He said that the site would be kept up and running by part-time assistants.

4chan has offered a forum for people to post whatever they want, from adult content to cooking tips. The posts stay online for a short time before being deleted, The New York Times reports.

Poole declined to discuss the terms of the deal, but with similar sites like Reddit and Imgur receiving tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding, the price tag for 4chan could be large.

Poole considered 4chan as more of a hobby than a business. He trained people to take over and operate the site before he departed.

4chan has a great deal of traffic coming to its site but does not track its users to offer targeted ads like Facebook and Google do.

Poole has not indicated what the future of 4chan will be or what direction he thinks Hiroyuki will take it.