Reddit Intends to Tokenize Karma Points and Onboard Half a Million Users to Web3

Social media giant Reddit is doubling down on its embrace of digital currencies and associated innovations with the latest push into Web3.0.

According to one of the social media’s latest hires, Rahul, the firm primarily focuses on decentralizing social media. Its latest plans are to tokenize Karma Points using the Ethereum blockchain.

The tokenized Karma points will aid more flexible decision-making amongst subreddits, akin to a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Using the tokenized Karma points, subreddits in disagreements can be forked democratically. According to the software engineer, a forked subreddit can be likened to switching from one different ecosystem, such as Facebook to Twitter, without losing contribution points.

In actualizing these important innovations, Rahul said Reddit would partner with Offchain Labs’ Arbitrum network. Through the partnership, Reddit will be able to create its own blockchain instance where users’ tokenized community points can be stored. 

“Everything will be permissionless, open-source, and decentralized, just like crypto. I can’t wait for it to hit mainnet and see how DAOs are formed and what DeFi, NFT applications might emerge,” Rahul tweeted.

Social media companies are becoming engrossed with a switch into the blockchain ecosystem, with Twitter building the BlueSky project. This decentralized protocol is billed to serve as a foundation for various social media platforms to be built on it. Facebook is also making a big push into the metaverse, as unveiled when it changed its name to Meta, as reported by Blockchain.news last week.

Having benefited a great deal from centralized content control, Rahul said one of the core innovations of the switch into a decentralized social media world is to test a financial model that will help “explore a new monetization strategy.” This new tokenization plan will build on the Ethereum based reward system that is currently being applied to the r/Cryptocurrency and r/FortniteBR subreddits, respectively. The latest push by the social media giant is set to onboard 500 million new users into Web3.0.