Reddit is sunsetting its blockchain-based Community Points product, the company announced on Tuesday. A Reddit admin (employee) shared the announcement about Community Points, which uses the Ethereum blockchain, on a few subreddits, including r/CryptoCurrency (which had its own “moons” crypto token), r/FortniteBR (which had its own “bricks” token), and r/EthTrader (which had its own “donuts” token).
The value of those tokens has, predictably, fallen off of a cliff, as CoinDesk reports drops of between 60 and 90 percent.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“Though we saw some future opportunities for Community Points, the resourcing needed was unfortunately too high to justify,” Reddit’s director of consumer and product communications Tim Rathschmidt told TechCrunch.
First launched in 2020, Community Points were awarded to users who positively engaged in select subreddits in order to incentivize better content and conversation.
The points were essentially interchangeable Ethereum tokens stored in Reddit’s Vault, which operated as a cryptocurrency wallet.
Since the points were on the blockchain, the program aimed to allow users to display their “reputation” anywhere online, and could be embedded in other sites or apps.
“Putting all Reddit users on the main Ethereum network, for example, would be infeasible and prohibitively expensive,” the Community Points page said.
In the years since launching Community Points, Reddit has rolled out a number of community incentives like the moderator rewards program and the Contributor Program, which awards actual money by allowing eligible users to convert their Reddit gold and karma into cash.
The original article contains 738 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This launched in 2020? I thought they launched it in 2023 as a replacement to the awards system?