Reddit Goes Arbitrum L2 To Scale Community Points Program

Reddit announced that it chose Arbitrum L2 – an Ethereum L2 based scalability solution featuring roll-ups to scale its community points program on July 22. It will operate first on the Rinkeby testnet, before implementation on the Ethereum mainnet itself. Reddit has hundreds of millions of daily users. That’s why it’s not possible to economically run the community points program on the base layer directly.

How will the Arbitrum Layer 2 work?

The Arbitrum Layer 2 solution will allow the onboarding of millions of users to the blockchain. The move will expand the Ethereum ecosystem user base massively and generate new value for the native Ether token. Reddit announced in the official blog post that it chose Arbitrum because it’s decentralized, developer-friendly, and has broad ecosystem support. 

The world’s renowned social media, news posting, and discussion site launched the community points initiative in May 2020 in a limited manner as a means for the users to own a piece of “their favorite communities” and then embarked on a competition to develop a solution which can support such a tremendous number of users and their activity called The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off.

It invited different teams to make Ethereum compatible with Reddit’s needs. A lot of teams participated and presented a plethora of unique projects – Offchain Labs Arbitrum won the race finally. This final solution will help Reddit implement an interactive reputation-based system.

Reddit’s community points initiative allows communities to reward talented users for quality work through tipping and transfers, these points will let users access premium features or special content. They are likely to have significant value, so users can transfer and trade them also. The community points are ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, which operate under full user control on Reddit’s Ethereum wallet implementation – the Vault.