Key takeaways:
- According to Twitter posts by a cryptocurrency engineer working at Reddit, the social media giant is working on converting community points into ETH-based ERC-20 digital tokens
- If the Web 3.0 overhaul of the Karma point system materializes, more than 500 million Reddit monthly users will become cryptocurrency owners
- Reddit’s plan of tokenizing Karma points was not yet confirmed or denied by official sources
In what could shape up to be one of the biggest onboardings in the history of cryptocurrency, social media platform Reddit is supposedly working on transforming community points of its 500 million active monthly users into Ethereum-based digital tokens.
Incentivizing user participation with crypto rewards
According to Amazon’s web analytics service Alexa, Reddit ranks as the 7th most frequently visited site among the resident of the United States with more than 50 million daily active users.
Reddit users can accumulate community points, better known as Karma points, by posting content (either posts or comments) and receiving so-called upvotes for their participation.
While these upvotes amounted to nothing other than a growing collection of Karma points up to now, Reddit is reportedly working on implementing a Web 3.0 framework that would overhaul the current system of community points and turn them into digital tokens.
According to the Twitter post by a crypto engineer working at Reddit, Rahul, “Your Karma points will soon be tokens.” He continued, “Everything will be permissionless, open-source, and decentralized just like crypto.” Per Rahul, the social media giant will not destroy existing Karma points that users have collected throughout the years.
The cryptocurrency engineer working on Reddit went on to explain the technical details of how karma points tokenization might take place:
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).
As of this writing, 80,000 users from r/cryptocurrency and r/FortNiteBR have reportedly had their Karma points transferred to the testnet network deployed on OffChain Labs’ Artibtrum network.
Reddit is home to a lively community of investors, called r/wallstreetbets, which have recently received a fair share of the mainstream spotlight due to their involvement in GameStop and AMC’s stock pump that took place earlier in the year. On the cryptocurrency side of things, several community-driven blockchain projects have received their initial boost on Reddit – the biggest memecoin Dogecoin is a prime example of the Reddit community’s outreach.
Up until now, no official confirmation regarding Reddit’s plan to tokenize users’ Karma points has been made.
