Reddit Phases Out Blockchain-Based Community Points Rewards

Reddit has made a big decision to discontinue Community Points, a blockchain-based rewards program, citing issues with scalability and regulatory difficulties.

Reddit recently announced that it will be ending its innovative Community Points scheme. The official announcement of the change was made in a statement that was first posted on TechCrunch, where Reddit highlighted the significant difficulties created by the current regulatory climate and scalability constraints.

Community Points

The Community Points project, which was announced in 2020, was offered as a novel way to reward and recognize user engagement inside particular subreddits. Users may earn these benefits by doing things like getting a lot of likes on their comments or posts, which would encourage good engagement across the platform’s many groups.

Community Points, in contrast to traditional virtual points, were represented as ERC-20 tokens and were safely kept in the Reddit Vault, the company’s own cryptocurrency wallet.

The option to use Community Points in a variety of ways, such as trading them for distinctive emojis or desired badges, was cherished by recipients. By being redeemed, these points were essentially “burned,” taking them out of circulation.

In an intentional move to reduce transaction fees and handle scalability issues, the program switched from operating originally on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain to Layer 2 Arbitrum Nova in August of the previous year. The business, however, has decided to stop using this innovative technique.

Reddit stated that it made the conscious choice to reallocate resources in order to focus on creating products that benefit a wider range of its users rather than continuing to support Community Points. The platform is still steadfastly devoted to innovation and is actively looking into additional products that are consistent with the founding goals of the Community Points program. In order to completely stop offering this service, Reddit has set a sunset date of November 8 as the final day.