Reddit joins the Ethereum Foundation to develop scalability tools

Reddit is increasing its role in the Ethereum ecosystem (here the quotation in real time), with the aim of building scalability tools for the blockchain network.

A new ally for Ethereum's scalability

The social media platform announced Wednesday that it is expanding its work with the Ethereum Foundation to provide resources in developing scalability tools.

In the announcement, posted on the Ethereum subreddit, Reddit employee u / jarins said the company's choice increases its commitment to technology and echoes its long-standing "decentralized ethics".

"In this new phase of our partnership, efforts will be focused immediately on bringing Ethereum to Reddit-scale production," the announcement reads. "Our intention is to help accelerate the progress made on scalability and develop the technology needed to launch large-scale applications such as Community Points on Ethereum."

This partnership could lead Reddit to work on Level 2 scalability tools or push designs from prototype stage to production. Reddit development resources, including a team of developers, would be involved in this work.

Ultimately, the idea is that a project like Reddit's Community Points feature might be able to support the site's millions of users (Reddit has over 50 million daily users at press time, according to Wednesday's announcement). . "Our blockchain efforts will be led by Reddit's Crypto team," the announcement reads, adding that the company currently has job opportunities for back-end engineers.

Community points

Reddit introduced Community Points last year, distributing them to the CryptoCurrency and FortNiteBR subreddits (two communities built around the cryptocurrency discussion and FortNite game).

In short, the idea is that users can reward each other for creating "quality posts", with these points being converted into badges or other custom features. Such points are stored on Ethereum's Rinkeby testnet as an ERC-20 token, which means that unlike Reddit's internal karma system, the company cannot control these points.

The company had been experimenting with the idea for at least a month before rolling it out on the website. In June, he asked the community to help the project with regard to scalability. The company hasn't provided data on the volume of how many points have been awarded or redeemed to date, but the CryptoCurrency and FortNiteBR subreddits each had over 1 million users at press time.

It doesn't appear that Reddit has any plans to expand the system to other communities or move from Rinkeby to the Ethereum mainnet. "The scaling technology developed through this partnership will be open source and publicly available for use by anyone," the announcement reads.