Reddit Asks Ethereum Community for Help With Scaling Tokens for 430M Users

Reddit Asks for Help From Ethereum Community With Scaling Tokens for 430M Users

Social content platform Reddit is pushing forward with its Ethereum-driven “Community Points” reward system, announcing that it is looking for developers to help it with creating scaling soltion for the tokens up for use by all of its 430 million monthly users.

On June 19, Reddit announced it was partnering with the Ethereum Foundation to call for projects developing Ethereum (ETH) scaling solutions.

“Our goal is to find a solution that will support hundreds of thousands of Community Points users on mainnet today, and can eventually scale to all of Reddit (430 million monthly users),” Reddit posted. Reddit will accept applications from developers until July 31, 2020.

Gas costs a factor

Reddit’s announcement stresses that there are some unique requirements, noting that many existing Ethereum scaling solutions are developed for exchanges and optimized for transactions.

“Many of these designs don’t take into consideration the costs of obtaining tokens or entering the scaling system,” Reddit said. “Community Points distributions have cost an order of magnitude more gas than all other operations combined, primarily due to on-chain storage costs associated with onboarding new users.”

Reddit notes that now it is “unclear how to determine the best solution”, noting that despite strong hype around use-cases similar to its points system, “there are very few objective real-world reviews or comparisons of various products/implementations.”

Community vetting of proposals encouraged

Reddit asks “all scaling experts in the Ethereum community” to provide scaling demos in the comments section of its announcement, emphasizing that “all demos need to simulate Community Points usage for 100,000 users.”

The platform also requests that scaling experts comment on proposals submitted by other community members so it can better understand the trade-offs that result from different solutions.

Demos should include “a live proof of concept showing hundreds of thousands of transactions,” source code, and detailed breakdown of cost estimates, APIs, and how to operate the proposed scaling architectures.

Fortnite players embrace Community Points

In May, Reddit revealed its plans of migrating its points system from the Rinkeby testnet onto the Ethereum mainnet before the end of the year.

Rumor of Reddit’s crypto-driven rewards first appeared during early April, with trials for Community Points being launched for the cryptocurrency and Fortnite subreddit communities last month.

So far, 17,413 Fortnite-playing Redditors have signed up for the rewards system, while it’s crypto community members have only created 3,646 wallets.