Reddit has stated that it will soon halt its long-running, blockchain-based rewards service, Community Points, citing scalability concerns.
In an official Oct. 17 announcement in the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit, a Reddit team member said that, while the platform saw some future opportunities for Community Points, there was no path to scale it broadly across the platform.
The Community Points service, including the special membership feature, will be shut down on Nov. 8. At that point users will also no longer see Points in the Reddit Vault nor earn any more Points in the communities.
The points were Ethereum-based ERC-20 tokens stored in the platform’s in-house crypto wallet service, dubbed the “Reddit Vault. Initially launched on the Ethereum network, the points service later migrated to the layer-2 scaling solution Arbitrum to facilitate higher scalability.
Each subreddit had its own token, with the Moons (MOON) token being the native crypto asset of the r/CryptoCurrency board, while Bricks (BRICK) was for the r/FortNiteBR subreddit. Users could spend these points on badges and exclusive items for their avatars.
The value of the Reddit tokens MOON and BRICK plunged following the news, and Reddit users and crypto enthusiasts expressed their disappointment and anger at the decision.