In an official Oct 17 announcement in the r/cryptocurrency subreddit, a member of the Reddit team said while the platform sees some future opportunities for Community Points, there was no path to scale it broadly across the platform.
“Community Points”, including the premium membership feature, will be shut down on Nov 8. At that time, you will no longer see Points in your Reddit Vault nor earn more Points in your community, the Reddit team member wrote.
Launched in May 2020, “Community Points” rewarded users with points for active engagement in specific subreddits and was designed to encourage high-quality content on the platform. These points are Ethereum-based ERC-20 tokens stored in the platform’s internal crypto wallet service called “Reddit Vault”. Initially launched on the Ethereum network, the point service later migrated to the Arbitrum layer 2 scaling solution for increased scalability.
After the announcement, users rushed to sell Reddit’s two community tokens, MOON and BRICK, leading to sharp decline in prices of two tokens by more than 90%. MOON has dropped more than 90%, falling to the lowest level of $0.022 before recovering to the current price of $0.033. Meanwhile, BRICK has lost nearly 92% of its value, falling to a low of $0.0078, before rising to the current price of $0.05.
Each subreddit has its own token, with the Moons (MOON) token being the native crypto asset of the r/cryptocurrency board, while the Bricks (BRICK) token is for the r/FortNiteBR subreddit. Users can use these points to purchase badges and exclusive items for their virtual character.
In response to Reddit’s announcement, the moderators of the r/cryptocurrency subreddit said that they just learned of the decision and are “disappointed” about it.
“First and foremost your Moons are still yours and are not going to be burned. Transfer functionality in the smart contract is not being shut off, and Reddit is removing their control over the contract,” they wrote.
Many Reddit users have expressed outrage about this Reddit’s decision. Anonymous trader Byzantine General told his 163,000 followers on Twitter X that Reddit “just rugged their users by discontinuing their native cryptocurrency.”