Reddit Is Adding Cryptocurrency To The Platform, Integrating It Via Karma Points

A Reddit engineer reveals that the platform is looking into incorporating cryptocurrency through Karma points (aka Community Points) obtained by users.

The cryptocurrency train is chugging along at full speed, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter boarded a while back, and now it seems that Reddit's looking to purchase a ticket as well. Let's dispense with the locomotive metaphor, however, and get down to brass tacks. Cryptocurrency is a major form of online transaction nowadays, and while it still hasn't taken the place of real life national currencies in terms of online usage, the stuff is catching up fast. It feels almost weird to imagine that all of this was kicked off by Bitcoin; the cryptocurrency revolution can all be traced back to an incredibly unstable online trend back in 2012. At any rate, many platforms are now looking into integrating cryptocurrency as a proper form of monetary exchange. Most recently, Patreon commented on potentially utilizing it as a way for patrons to receive rewards from their favorite creators.

Reddit seems to be charting a slightly different course, using it's already existing Karma system in order to establish the presence of cryptocurrency on the platform. Karma, for those unaware, is a reward system which grants users points for post threads that gather a lot of upvotes from the community. Threads with a lot of Karma are often demarcated by award symbols that appear next to the relevant usernames. With such a system, Reddit already has a method of dispensing cryptocurrency to its userbase. All that needs to be done is for an exchange system to be set up. For a certain amount of Karma, users can attain a certain amount of cryptocurrency.

This is a system that, along with modernizing Reddit in a major, relevant manner, will also invite further engagement from the community. Ultimately, everyone wins! 500 million monthly active users is brilliant for any online community, but those numbers could always go a smidge higher. Reddit plans on utilizing Ethereum as the basis for it's own cryptocurrency.

In other news, Reddit is also moving the above mentioned 500 million monthly users onto Web3.0, which is essentially the third generation of internet based services and platforms. The transition will also be accompanied by a strategy to move towards an even more community oriented approach for the platform, empowering users even further in making decisions that affect both individual sub-reddits and decentralized Reddit at large.

Omar Marques/SOPA Images/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

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