Reddit is a juggernaut of a website when it comes to global popularity.
That’s why the Ethereum community hailed one of its biggest adoption milestones yet this week upon Reddit’s beta launch of Ethereum-powered “Community Points” tokens.
The first token roll outs will be $MOONS for the r/Cryptocurrency subreddit and $BRICKS for r/FortniteBR, the top subreddit dedicated to the popular cross-platform battle royale game Fortnite.
The development is a major one for Ethereum because of the new influx of exposure the smart contract platform’s set to receive accordingly. Per the Alexa web traffic analysis tool, Reddit is currently the 19th most visited website in the world and the 7th most visited in the U.S.
Moreover, both the r/Cryptocurrency and r/FortniteBR forums have more than 1 million registered users each, and Fortnite proper still easily notches several dozen million active players monthly. Ethereum has some impressive new pipelines for potential users, as such.
How Community Points Work
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For now, Reddit’s Community Points system is in beta, and its inaugural tokens currently only exist on Ethereum’s Rinkeby testnet. However, the pilot program is well fleshed out and points to what may be coming for hundreds of other subreddits.
In a new FAQ on the launch, the Reddit team explained:
“Community Points are a way for Redditors to own a piece of their favorite communities. As a unit of ownership, Points capture some of the value of their community. They can be spent on premium features and are used as a measure of reputation in the community.”
Each subreddit will be respectively capped at having 250 million Community Points, and subreddits will only start out with preliminary allotments of 50 million tokens. These tokens will be dispensed monthly and will be based on rewarding users for their forum contributions, Reddit said:
“People earn Points by contributing to the community, for example by submitting quality posts and comments. Based on these contributions, the community ultimately decides how many Points each person receives.”
Interestingly, Reddit can embrace these tokens, but since they are underpinned by blockchain tech, Reddit can’t control how they are used beyond Reddit. That means Community Points may soon trade on decentralized exchanges and be adopted far beyond Reddit’s “walled garden.”
New In-Game Currency for Fortnite?
Being that r/Cryptocurrency is a crypto subreddit, many of its users won’t find using Ethereum alien at all.
What will be really interesting to watch going forward, though, is the extent to which r/FortniteBR embraces $BRICKS tokens since Fortnite isn’t directly related to crypto in any way. However, Fortnite has many young and tech-savvy users that certainly don’t lack the imagination to make $BRICKS their own.
And what if $BRICKS ends up being adopted as an in-game currency in Fortnite? 1confirmation founder Nick Tomaino posited the possibility on Twitter this week, and it’s definitely a compelling prospect.
What if r/FortNiteBR $bricks evolve into actual Fortnite in-game currency?
V-bucks but with grassroots adoption, speculative value and global liquidity.
— Nick Tomaino (@NTmoney) May 14, 2020
Later on in that same thread, Tomaino argued that the chances of Community Points taking on major activity beyond subreddits was “not lost on Reddit.”
Not sure about Fortnite in particular, but I do think an interesting second-order effect of community points will be that they will be used off Reddit on other platforms that the subreddit users care about. This is not lost on Reddit. Why else make points ERC20?
— Nick Tomaino (@NTmoney) May 14, 2020
The Emergence of Loot Tokens
Adam Cochran, a partner at MetaCartel Ventures, recently published an excellent in-depth analysis of the top 10,000 Ethereum addresses. Another area that Cochran has been focusing on lately is “loot tokens,” which he argues is an emerging class of crypto that’s distinct from governance tokens, dApp tokens, and beyond.
Cochran defines loot tokens as tokens that are “earnable within a community rather than purchased,” and in a new post this week the analyst and investor hailed Community Points as Reddit decisively embracing loot tokens.
This is good news for Ethereum, the cryptoeconomy’s top tokenization platform to date, and suggests other websites beyond Reddit will explore similar initiatives in time.
