Reddit and the Ethereum Foundation will pool resources towards the development of scaling technologies for projects like Community Points
Reddit, the social media news aggregation, web content rating and discussion website has announced that it will be joining Ethereum Foundation, the non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting Ethereum and related technologies in building scaling tools for the blockchain network. The collaboration marks Reddit’s first-ever blockchain partnership.
Yesterday’s announcement, made on the Ethereum subreddit by Reddit admin u/jarins explained that the partnership’s goal is to improve Reddit’s “commitment to blockchain, accelerate scaling and resources for the Ethereum ecosystem, and bring the value and independence of blockchain technology to millions of redditors”.
It further stated that the collaboration will focus on pooling resources with the Ethereum Foundation to work towards the development of scaling tools, adding that its latest partnership echoes the social media’s long-held “decentralised ethos”.
“In this new stage of our partnership, immediate efforts will be focused on bringing Ethereum to Reddit-scale production,” the announcement said.
With over 1.7 billion monthly visits, Reddit is one of the most popular social media platforms that has shown increasing interest in blockchain technology. In 2020, Reddit initiated Community Points and The Great Reddit Scaling Bake Off—two large Ethereum focused projects.
Community Points was Reddit’s incentive system that awarded Reddit users ERC 20 tokens to reward them for contributing engaging content to the platform. This was followed by the Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off which looked for submissions of Ethereum scaling solutions that could enable projects like Community Points to progress to mainnet and eventually scale to the network’s 400+ million monthly users.
The latest development can be viewed as a more formalised engagement with the Ethereum Foundation in light of the two projects in 2020. Addressing this, Reddit said, “Our intention is to help accelerate the progress being made on scaling and develop the technology needed to launch large-scale applications like Community Points on Ethereum”.
The project to develop scaling technologies will be led by Reddit’s in-house crypto team, the announcement confirmed. It also called upon any backend engineers with an interest in scaling to join the Reddit crypto team to help with its work on creating a more decentralised internet. Reddit added that the scaling technology developed as a result of this partnership will be open-sourced to the public.
The Community Points project is currently in the beta stage on the Rinkeby network and is being tested in r/Cryptocurrency and r/FortNiteBR. Reddit believes that the application is the “first attempt at utilising decentralised technology to empower individuals to have a sense of accountability and more ownership in the communities that they create and contribute to”.
