Reddit’s blockchain-based Community Points are going away

Reddit’s blockchain-based Community Points are going away

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit is sunsetting its blockchain-based Community Points product, the company announced on Tuesday. A Reddit admin (employee) shared the announcement about Community Points, which uses the Ethereum blockchain, on a few subreddits, including r/CryptoCurrency (which had its own “moons” crypto token), r/FortniteBR (which had its own “bricks” token), and r/EthTrader (which had its own “donuts” token).

The value of those tokens has, predictably, fallen off of a cliff, as CoinDesk reports drops of between 60 and 90 percent. Some Reddit posters claim thousands of dollars in value disappeared from their wallets immediately, while others are pointing at transactions made just prior to Tuesday’s announcement that they think are suspicious.

Community Points will go away by November 8th. According to the announcement, the admin said that the company shutting down Community Points because “there was no path to scale it broadly across the platform.” While the moderators and communities that supported the feature “have been incredible partners,” the admin said that “the regulatory environment has added to scalability limitations.” The admin added that Community Points “wouldn’t migrate well” to the updated reddit.com experience “without an outsized commitment to resources.”

Instead, the company plans to focus on “more scalable programs” like the recently launched Contributor Program, which will let you turn Reddit gold into real money, the admin says. When Community Points are officially sunset, you won’t see them in your Vault on the Reddit app.

Reddit launched Community Points in May 2020. Reddit has already pulled its website about for Community Points, but you can see an archive of the page from September (where the company still called the product a beta) on the Wayback Machine. In August 2022, Reddit announced an integration with the now-disgraced cryptocurrency firm FTX. Reddit is still supporting its blockchain-based Collectible Avatars, which are NFTs, spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.