Reddit to Cease Blockchain-Based Community Points Service

By: Eva Baxter

Reddit has announced the discontinuation of its blockchain-based Community Points feature, citing scalability issues as the main cause of the service’s demise. The Community Points were rewarded to Reddit users for their positive engagement within specific subreddits, acting as incentives for producing high-quality content on the platform. A Reddit team member revealed in a recent official announcement that while the platform saw potential for Community Points, there was no viable path to scaling it across the platform widely.

The Community Points, including the special memberships feature, will cease operation on November 8. Reddit users will then no longer be able to see Points in their Reddit Vault nor earn any more Points in their communities. These points existed as Ethereum-based ERC-20 tokens that were stored in Reddit’s in-house crypto wallet service, the Reddit Vault. Over time, the points service moved to the layer-2 scaling solution Arbitrum for better scalability. Each subreddit had its unique token. For instance, Moons (MOON) was the native crypto asset of the r/cryptocurrency and Bricks (BRICK) for the r/FortNiteBR subreddit. These points could be spent on badges and exclusive items for user avatars.

According to a moderator of r/cryptocurrency subreddit, users will retain ownership of their Moons as they will not be burned and Reddit will be removing their control over the contract. The discontinuation decision has led to a significant drop in the value of the Reddit tokens MOON and BRICK.