Reddit Pulls the Plug on Its Crypto Community

Reddit Sunsets Cryptocurrency Initiatives

According to a post made on October 17, Reddit is winding down its Community Points initiative - a program that saw various behaviours on the platform rewarded with Ethereum-based tokens stored in Reddit’s own ‘vault’.

Said points could previously be spent by community members on various items and memberships within the Reddit platform, with each user’s number of points displayed as part of their profile, in an attempt to reflect the user’s reputation.

“We recently made the decision to sunset the Community Points beta, including Special Memberships, by November 8th. At that point, you’ll also no longer see Points in your Reddit Vault nor earn any more Points in your communities. Though we saw some future opportunities for Community Points, there was no path to scale it broadly across the platform.”, reads the post.

Reddit’s Rationale

Reddit’s post cites scalability issues as one of the primary drivers behind its decision, with the current “regulatory environment” adding to “scalability limitations”.

The post claims that “without an outsized commitment to resources” the blockchain initiative would be untenable, but that it still loves the idea behind the initiative itself. 

The platform further clarified its intentions to double down on other initiatives, such as its Contributor Program, to which it will redirect the “Time and efforts previously spent on Community Points”.

“There were significant learnings from Community Points and the feedback many of you gave, that we’re now actively bringing forward to more communities and redditors. In other words: we’ll continue the spirit of Points by further investing in empowering communities and rewarding contributions.”

Collapsing Values Amidst Community Outrage

Since the announcement was made, holders of the two associated tokens, MOON and BRICK, have unsurprisingly been offloading their bags, driving the price of the assets downward in an aggressive spiral.

Just a day after the announcement was made, MOON has plummeted between 80-90% and is left with a market capitalization of just $3.6 million at time of writing.

BRICK has been similarly affected but remains larger than MOON, shedding more than half of its value over the last day, according to CoinMarketCap.

Whilst responses have been mixed, some users are heartbroken at Reddit’s unexpected announcement, citing large amounts of time wasted: