Social networking platform Reddit seems to be catching up with the crypto culture and is likely to join contemporaries like Facebook on the next chapter of the Internet revolution. The platform is planning to offer Ethereum-based crypto tokens to people with specific numbers of Karma Points. An engineer working with Reddit earlier this month revealed fresh details on the pro-crypto changes that are being considered for implementation on the platform that, according to him, is used by 500 million monthly active users.
Karma Points are awarded to Reddit users if their post threads gather votes. By transforming these Karma Points into ERC-20 tokens, the platform aims to move its 500 million users onto the Web3.0 – which is the progression of the Internet we know today.
As per the engineer Rahul Kothari, Reddit aims to decentralise the Internet that could benefit the individuals and communities that thrive on the platform.
“Users control their community points, their profiles, and their own communities. Ideally, we all want to live in a world where one company/ person can't make such decisions but rather a community does!” Kothari tweeted.
The platform has also partnered with OffChinaLabs — a New York-based company that is building a suite of scaling solutions for the Ethereum blockchain to support their future plans.
“We believe in a new dawn for the Internet, where it can be free once again. We don't have all the answers, but we believe together we can find a way,” reads a blog post on Reddit, while inviting people to “create a vault” and join it in a “new beginning”.
Kothari believes that integrating crypto into the Reddit infrastructure could lead to the emergence of more decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols and applications around non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Reddit's fast-tracked inclination towards the crypto space comes just days after Facebook announced its rebranding to “Meta” — validating the crypto-backed future of the Internet.
In a pro-crypto approach, Twitter is also testing a new tab that will allow users to showcase their NFT collections on the micro-blogging platform. NFTs are digital collectibles inspired by real-life objects and can be purchased using crypto assets.
In recent times, crypto adoption has witnessed significant growth in several parts of the world including India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and the US, among other nations.
In September, El Salvador became the first in the world to legalise Bitcoin as a legal tender alongside its fiat currency, the US Dollar.
In October, the market capitalisation of all the cryptocurrencies put together crossed a milestone of $2.5 trillion (roughly Rs. 1,87,42,625 crore), according to cryptocurrency tracker CoinMarketCap.
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