Reddit has said it will soon shutter its long-running, blockchain-based rewards service “Community Points,” citing scalability concerns.
In an official Oct. 17 announcement in 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 be wound down on Nov. 8. “At that point, you’ll also no longer 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 in 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 their avatars.
In response to the original statement, the r/cryptocurrency moderator “CryptoMods” explained they had only just learned of the decision and were “disappointed” by the move.
Related: Reddit community tokens soar on Kraken listing
“First and foremost your Moons are still yours and are not going to be burned. Transfer functionality in the smart contract is 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 decision.
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 company Reddit) just rugged their users by “discontinuing” their native cryptocurrency.
-90% just like 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 original post on r/cryptocurrency.
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