In May, Reddit announced its cryptocurrency, based on Ethereum, called Community Points, to reward users for their content. Given the success of the project and the 430 million active users on a monthly basis that the platform has, Reddit has now decided to enter into a partnership with Vitalik Buterin to increase the scalability of the system.
The partnership, announced a few hours ago, foresees that the Ethereum Foundation will help Reddit to find a layer 2 solution, as also explained by Executive Director Ayako Miyaguchi.
In fact, the Community Points, which are ERC20 tokens, replace the traditional “upvote” of the platform, which is used to vote for valuable content.
One of the problems with such a large and used system is that gas would cost too much to make the transactions. The post, in fact, states:
“Most existing scaling solutions focus on the exchange use case, which favors 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”.
Moreover, in the article, Reddit also asks for the help of fans, who will have until July 31st, 2020 to send their solutions in demo format. The system must also be decentralized.
In a period of 5 days, as requested by Reddit, the protocol must be able to manage:
- 100,000 point claims (minting & distributing points)
- 25,000 subscriptions
- 75,000 one-off points burning
- 100,000 transfers
Overall, these are significant numbers. The idea of Reddit is certainly interesting and has already taken hold in the social network community.
In fact, from launch to date, so in a period of 1 month, Reddit explains that the Community Points have been used by 17,500 users, with 20 thousand transfers.
