Reddit partners with Ethereum Foundation to boost scaling and resources

Popular social media network Reddit, which counts over 1.7 billion monthly visits, is deepening its ties with the Ethereum Foundation in what it has formalized as its first-ever blockchain partnership.

According to an announcement from Reddit admin u/jarins, the aim of the partnership will be to increase the site’s  “commitment to blockchain, accelerating scaling and resources for the Ethereum ecosystem, and bringing the value and independence of blockchain technology to millions of redditors.”

In 2020, Reddit had already initiated two, large Ethereum-focused projects. The first, an application called Community Points, was a rewards system that awarded redditors with ERC-20 tokens for contributing engaging content to the platform. Reddit then followed this up with a competition — The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off — seeking submissions of Ethereum scaling technology solutions that could help applications like Community Points progress to mainnet and ultimately scale to all of the network’s 400+ million monthly users.

With this next stage of a more formalized engagement with the Ethereum Foundation, the focus will be on developing the scaling technology that can support large-scale applications like Community Points on the Ethereum blockchain. The project will be led by Reddit’s in-house crypto team and the announcement includes an appeal to any backend engineers who have an interest in scaling and would be interested in joining the Reddit crypto team to help with its work on developing a more decentralized internet. All the scaling technology developed through the new partnership will be open-sourced to the public.

According to the post, Community Points are currently in beta on the Rinkeby network and are being tested in r/Cryptocurrency and r/FortNiteBR. Reddit sees the application as its “first attempt at utilizing decentralized technology to empower individuals to have a sense of accountability and more ownership in the communities that they create and contribute to.“

In recent days, redditors have been making headlines for their coordinated day trading campaign to pump shares in the games retailer GameStop — rinsing seasoned hedge funds in the process.