Reddit is facing the huge demand for Ethereum-based "Community Points" already a month after the product launch. Now the social media site is looking for a scalability solution.
Posted in r / Ethereum subreddit on Thursday, Reddit's post announced a partnership with the Ethereum Foundation to find a Level 2 (L2) scalability technique for the 430 million users of the site. Community points are earned by accumulating "grades" on posts and can be used to purchase personalized GIFs or emojis.
The existing or under development scalability techniques
Ethereum Foundation Executive Director Ayako Miyaguchi tweeted: "The Ethereum blockchain for decentralized applications has experimented with various scalability techniques since its launch on the mainnet in 2015."
The scalability debate was addressed in two parts: first with work on the Ethereum blockchain Proof-of-Work (PoW) called Eth 1.x still ongoing, followed by the future update of Eth 2.0, which promises scalability "Unlimited" through two technologies called Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and sharding. Eth 2.0, sometimes referred to as Serenity, remains a highly technical project without a fixed timeline, although an initial phase is tentatively scheduled for the end of the year.
In contrast, Ethereum's Devcon 5 in Osaka, Japan, in October 2019, showed ready-to-launch L2 options such as the ZK-Rollup and Optimistic Rollup of the plasma coding group, which now operates under the Optimism name. . The decentralized exchange IDEX, for example, currently negotiates this variant of the product. But if you want to trade bitcoins in a traditional and automatic way, you can use automatic trading software like Bitcoin Pro.
A specific solution for social media
However, Reddit is looking for a social media focused product. As the post notes, most of the L2 solutions have focused on exchanges, which require rapid transaction times that most blockchains are unable to manage.
"Many of these projects don't take into account the costs of getting tokens or entering the scalability system, which can be significant," says the post. "Community Point deployments resulted in an order of magnitude more in costs than all other combined operations, mainly due to the online storage prices associated with integrating new users."
Candidates are invited to submit project drafts by 31 July with reviews completed by September. Unfortunately, the only reward for these Reddit developers will be notoriety.
“This is your chance to gain some fame but, to be clear, there will be no prize if your solution is chosen or modified to meet Reddit's needs. Our lawyer invited us to write this notice, "says the post.
