Reddit – the world’s renowned social media, news posting, and discussion site has been involved with Web3 and blockchain tech for a while now.
Reddit – the world’s renowned social media, news posting, and discussion site has been involved with Web3 and blockchain tech for a while now. In May 2020, Reddit announced a limited rollout of community points initiative to tokenize the platform activity and incentivize user participation.
The tokenized Karma points will aid more flexible decision-making amongst subreddits, akin to a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Using the tokenized Karma points, subreddits in disagreements can be forked democratically. According to the software engineer, a forked subreddit can be likened to switching from one different ecosystem, such as Facebook to Twitter, without losing contribution points.
In three guiding words, Decentralise – Social – Media, the Alexa software engineer disclosed that he would be working alongside some of the smartest engineers in transforming karma points into tokens.
“Everything will be permissionless, open-source, and decentralized, just like crypto. I can’t wait for it to hit mainnet and see how DAOs are formed and what DeFi, NFT applications might emerge,” Rahul tweeted.
Reddit’s partnership with Offchain Labs’ Arbitrum network will allow for the creation of a separate blockchain instance, to be used for storing users’ tokenized community points.
Currently, the community points of roughly 80,000 users from two subreddits — r/cryptocurrency and r/FortNiteBR — have been moved to the Rinkeby Testnet on the Arbitrum network, which according to Rahul, will be scaled for gasless transactions: “When we all pull this off, we would onboard 500M web2 users into web3 and then there is no going back. Let me say that again – 500 million new crypto users.”
In addition to the community token system and karma points tokenization, Reddit is developing its own Non-Fungibile Token (NFT) platform. The platform will help forum users display their creative skills and earn money from content creation.
