Reddit has said it’s going to soon shutter its long-running, blockchain-based rewards service “Community Points,” citing scalability concerns.
In an official Oct. 17 announcement within the r/cryptocurrency subreddit, a Reddit team member said while the platform saw “some future opportunities for Community Points, there was no path to scale it broadly across the platform.”
The Community Points service, including the special memberships feature, will probably be wound down on Nov. 8. “At that time, you’ll also now not see Points in your Reddit Vault nor earn any more Points in your communities,” the Reddit team member wrote.
First launched in May 2020, the community points feature rewarded users with points for positive engagement in certain subreddits and was designed to incentivize higher-quality content on the platform.
The points were Ethereum-based ERC-20 tokens stored within the platform’s in-house crypto wallet service dubbed the “Reddit Vault.”
Initially launched on the Ethereum network, the points service later migrated to the layer-2 scaling solution Arbitrum to facilitate higher scalability.
Each subreddit had its own token, with the Moons (MOON) token being the native crypto asset of the r/cryptocurrency board, while Bricks (BRICK) was for the r/FortNiteBR subreddit. Users could spend these points on badges and exclusive items for his or her avatars.
In response to the unique statement, the r/cryptocurrency moderator “CryptoMods” explained they’d only just learned of the choice and were “disenchanted” by the move.
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“First and foremost your Moons are still yours and should not going to be burned. Transfer functionality within the smart contract is just not being shut off, and Reddit is removing their control over the contract,” they wrote.
The value of the Reddit tokens MOON and BRICK plunged following the news, and Reddit users and crypto enthusiasts expressed their disappointment and anger at the choice.
Pseudonymous trader Byzantine General told his 163,000 followers on X (Twitter) that Reddit had essentially “rugged” their community, adding a screenshot of MOON’s price, which had fallen around 90%.
What the fuck, Reddit (yes actually the corporate Reddit) just rugged their users by “discontinuing” their native cryptocurrency.
-90% identical to that. pic.twitter.com/lzuqs1KNsX
— Byzantine General (@ByzGeneral) October 17, 2023
“Reddit essentially fucked over every r/cc user in hours. I’ve canceled my special membership. I’ll never use this fucking platform again. I hope whoever runs this cesspool rots in hell. What a fucking joke,” Reddit user “Bunker Beans” wrote in response to the unique post on r/cryptocurrency.
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