Reddit Reaches Out To Ethereum Gurus to Tokenize 430 Million-Strong Community

Reddit ranks as the 19th-most-visited website in the U.S. and in the world, according to Alexa Internet.

By
Richard Kastelein
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vitalik, reddit, ethereum, cryptocurrency, tokenomics, crypto-econonomics, ETH

American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website Reddit has teamed up with the crew from Ethereum to help with their new crypto-powered rewards system. Here is an overview of how Community Points work today and some stats on how it’s used.

From Reddit:

“In conjunction with the Ethereum Foundation, Reddit is inviting Ethereum scaling projects to show the community how your scaling solution can be used to bring Community Points to mainnet. Our goal is to find a solution that will support hundreds of thousands of Community Points users on mainnet today and can eventually scale to all of Reddit (430 million monthly users).”

The Reddit team evaluated some of the most promising scaling solutions and shared some of their thoughts:

  1. There are plenty of awesome projects that we don’t know about yet. We seem to learn about a promising new scaling solution every day.
  2. Most existing scaling solutions focus on the exchange use case, which favours optimizing for transfers. Many of these designs don’t take into consideration the costs of obtaining tokens or entering the scaling system, which can be significant. Community Points distributions have cost an order of magnitude more gas than all other operations combined, primarily due to on-chain storage costs associated with onboarding new users.
  3. It’s unclear how to determine the best solution. There is a lot of code, a lot of documentation, and a lot of hype out there. But there are very few objective real-world reviews or comparisons of various products/implementations.
  4. We need the Ethereum community’s help to figure this out.
Points Distribution & Claims
Token supply is controlled by distribution rounds managed in the Distributions contract and triggered by Reddit. For each round (occurring ~monthly), Reddit submits a proposal for points distribution to a subreddit for approval. Once approved, Reddit issues signed claims for individual users according to the agreed-upon points distribution. These claims can be redeemed on-chain. Claims are obtained from Reddit and submitted to the Distributions contract, which validates the claim and calls the Subreddit Points contract to mint points.

reddit, community, cryptocurrency, blockchain

Demos should include:

  1. A live proof of concept showing hundreds of thousands of transactions
  2. Source code (for on & off-chain components as well tooling used for the PoC). The source code does not have to be shared publicly, but if Reddit decides to use a particular solution it will need to be shared with Reddit at some point
  3. Documentation
    • How it works & scales
    • Cost estimates (on-chain and off-chain)
    • How to run it
    • Architecture
    • APIs (on-chain & off)
    • Known issues or tradeoffs
  4. Summary of cost & resource information for both on-chain & off-chain components used in the PoC, as well as cost & resource estimates for further scaling. If your PoC is not on mainnet, make note of any mainnet caveats (such as congestion issues).