Reddit Plans To Tokenize Karma Points, Add 500M New Crypto Users

Social media platform Reddit plans to convert user-earned “karma points” to tokens on the Ethereum ETH/USD blockchain as part of its broader goal to decentralize social media.

What Happened: In a series of tweets last week, Reddit Engineer Rahul outlined the Reddit crypto team’s plan to onboard 500 million new crypto users.

The company will reportedly convert users’ karma points into ERC-20 tokens.

“Your Community Points exist on the blockchain, independently of Reddit, where they can only be controlled by you (just like Bitcoin!). Neither Reddit nor moderators can take your Points away or decide what you do with them,” stated Reddit in a blog post.

These tokens would facilitate community-based decisions and the option to “fork subreddits” in case of disagreements, said Rahul.

The Reddit engineer went on to note that users would be able to do this without losing their community points itself, comparing the process of moving community points to the blockchain to moving from Facebook Inc FB to Twitter Inc TWTR without needing to rebuild a list of followers.

“Reddit has 500M monthly active users. 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,” said Rahul.

According to him, 80,000 Reddit users are already testing community points as tokens on the r/cryptocurrency and r/FortNiteBR subreddits. These tokens are live on the Rinkeby testnet powered by the Arbitrum network – an Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution.

How will we pull this off?

Reddit has partnered with @OffchainLabs (@arbitrum) and created our own separate instance.

Community points for 2 subreddits (~80,000 users) are already on Rinkeby Testnet on our Arbitrum network (separate to Arbitrum One). 🔥

— Rahul (@iamRahul20x) November 3, 2021

Last month, the social media company sought a senior backend engineer for an upcoming NFT platform.

“In case you haven’t heard, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the newest, most explosive movement in the world of crypto. With the power of blockchain, it is now possible to truly own digital assets on the internet in a way that wasn’t possible before,” said Reddit in the job posting.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash.