Reddit to Shut Down Community Points Feature

Reddit officialy said it will soon shutter its popular blockchain-based Community Points rewards service as there was “no path to scale” the system broadly across the platform.

The comment was made on 17 October by a Reddit team member on r/CryptoCurrency, who said that the Community Points service, and the Special Memberships, will be retired on 8 November. After this date, Reddit users will no longer see Points in their Reddit Vaults, nor be able to earn any more Points in their respective communities. The Reddit team member wrote:

“We still love the idea that inspired Community Points. Specifically, finding better ways to improve community governance and empower communities and contributions. Part of why we’re winding down Community Points is because we’re able to scale several products that accomplish what the Community Points program was trying to accomplish, while being easier to adopt and understand.”

He added that while Reddit did see “some future opportunities” for Community Points, the “resourcing needed was unfortunately too high to justify”. The feature was first launched in May 2020, allowing Reddit users to earn points through positive engagement in certain subreddits. These points were Ethereum-based tokens — which were stored on the platform’s “Reddit Vault” — and each subreddit had its own token.

Some of the more popular tokens belonged to the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit — called Moons (MOON) — and the r/FortNiteBR subreddit — called Bricks (BRICK) — and were mainly spent on badges and exclusive items for avatars. Shortly after Reddit announced its decision, the price of these tokens plummeted drastically, with MOON currently trading for 85% less than its original price, and BRICK going down by 50%.