Reddit to tokenize karma points, onboard 500 million new users

Reddit to tokenize karma points, onboard 500 million new users

Reddit, USA’s social media giant, is in talks of converting its user’s karma points into Ethereum-based (ERC-20) tokens alongside onboarding 500 million new crypto users, as per inputs from a newly hired engineer at Reddit.

A string of tweets by the new Reddit engineer, Rahul, has disclosed details about Reddit’s efforts for improving user interaction through various crypto initiatives. As reported by Cointelegraph in July 2021, Reddit had launched its own layer-two rollup utilizing the Arbitrum technology for its rewards points, branded as Community Points.

 According to the website, the ‘Your Community Points’ feature exists on the blockchain, independently of Reddit, where they can only be controlled by individuals just like Bitcoins.

Reddit’s partnership with Offchain Labs’ Arbitrum network would enable the creation of a separate blockchain instance, for using to store users’ tokenized community points. 

At present, the community points of about 80,000 users from subreddits — r/cryptocurrency and r/FortNiteBR — have been shifted to the Rinkeby Testnet on the Arbitrum network, which, according to the new joinee Rahul, would be scaled for gasless transactions.

Moreover, Reddit communities would also exhibit the ability to fork blockchains through community-based decisions, in addition to enabling the scope of exploring new monetization strategies with Web 3.0.

Rahul was noted saying that when Reddit pulls that off, they would have onboarded “500M web2 users into web3 and then there is no going back.”

Reddit, as a social media platform, has been home to several community-driven crypto initiatives, including Dogecoin (DOGE) fundraisers. It continues to cater to a vast global crypto community.

On October 22, Cointelegraph had reported on Reddit’s job posting for a senior backend engineer for a platform that is responsible for “millions of users to create, buy, sell and use NFT-backed digital goods.” 

According to the Reddit job posting, a vibrant community of owners rise up with every new NFT project. The job listing endorsed NFTs, suggesting that “it will only grow” with time, and soon it would play “a central role” in how fans support all their favourite creators and communities.

Various other social media platforms, including Twitter and TikTok, have also reported to initiate NFT exposures to their users, hence signalling a heightening possibility of crypto’s mainstream adoption.