Reddit deploys layer-2 solution aimed at scaling Ethereum-based community points

Published at: July 23, 2021

Social media platform Reddit announced it would be using scaling solution Arbitrum to handle scaling its Ethereum-based Community Points system.

In a Thursday announcement, Reddit administrator jarins said the platform had launched its own layer-2 rollup using Arbitrum technology for its rewards points. Reddit said it had deployed the layer-2 solution on top of the Rinkeby testnet before it plans to migrate to the Ethereum mainnet.

The platform cited Arbitrum’s features of being decentralized, being developer-friendly, and having broad ecosystem support in its decision. Arbitrum essentially “rolls up” transactions on a gasless sidechain with a separate set of security and consensus protocols, then reports the batched transactions to Ethereum. The development team at Offchain Labs has touted the project for scaling solutions.

Users on the social media platform earn Community Points by posting certain content to earn rewards. In the r/Cryptocurrency subreddit, these come in the form of Moon tokens, and in r/FortNiteBR, the points are known as Bricks. Reddit said the integration of Arbitrum could potentially result in faster and cheaper transactions for the platform’s tokens.

“You’ll notice transactions happen much faster, and once you’ve created a Vault, you won’t have to keep claiming Moons every month,” said Reddit. “They’ll just show up in your Vault like magic!”

Though the tokens from Community Points are popular on the platform, there is seemingly no clear consensus among crypto analytics sites how many are currently in circulation. Data from Etherscan shows roughly 67 septillion — that’s 24 zeros at the end — MOONs have been distributed to more than 78,000 holders. However, CoinMarketCap claims there is a total supply of only 6,962,504 tokens.

Redditors using the Moon tokens have already discovered practical financial applications simply by expressing their opinions on the platform. In January, a user by the name of satoshinakamoto7 claimed to have used MOON tokens to pay for their rent. Another traded the tokens for Bitcoin (BTC) before the price of the crypto asset rose to more than $30,000 in January.

“Today’s launch is a big step forward, but our work is far from done,” said jarins. “Our goal is to cross the chasm to mainstream adoption by bringing millions of users to blockchain.”