Reddit to Roll Out Site Wide Crypto Based Karma
A recent blockchain engineer hired to Reddit has revealed some of the major blockchain projects the company is working on.
Reddit recently hired a blockchain engineer, Rahul Kothari, who posted on Twitter some unconfirmed plans that Reddit is working on with their blockchain team. These plans include moving over to a decentralized system that would allow for forking their communities like you would a blockchain, and migrating their karma system, where users get points for comments or posts that have been upvoted by other users, over to a system backed by crypto tokens. Reddit has already introduced their token system, Community Points, and the subreddit community /r/cryptocurrency rewards crypto tokens called Moons. Moons have a market cap of $14.4M.
This is poised to be the largest migration from web2 to web3 as of yet with 500M registered Reddit users that could be brought into the fold. Many people are excited about this recent movement in social media because it allows users to profit from the content they create for the sites. To build the infrastructure for this, Reddit has partnered with Offchain Labs, the makers of Arbitrum, the Optimistic Rollup L2 scaling solution for Ethereum. Rahul even calls out that “Everything will be permissionless, open-source and decentralized.”
Reddit isn’t the first social media platform to work on crypto based solutions. Twitter and its CEO Jack Dorsey have also publicly talked about moving to decentralized, open solutions by integrating with blockchain technologies. Beyond them, there are new decentralized first social media sites launching like BitClout and their underlying token, DeSo.