Reddit to wind down blockchain-based rewards service ‘Community Points’

Reddit has said it will soon shutter its long-running, blockchain-based rewards service, “Community Points,” citing scalability concerns, reports Cointelegraph. In an official 17 October announcement in the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit, a Reddit team member said that, 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 membership feature, will be shut down on 8 November. “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 incentivise 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. Read more.