Reddit invites developers to submit Ethereum scaling proposals for its token project

Reddit is accepting proposals to scale Ethereum in the wake of launching a new crypto project, The Block has confirmed.

The company announced today that it has partnered with the Ethereum Foundation and it is asking developers to submit scaling solutions that will support its new initiative to distribute ERC-20 tokens to Reddit users as an incentive for quality content as part of its "community points" feature. 

"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)," the post stated.  

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Last month, Reddit announced that it is beta testing two ERC-20 tokens, $MOON and $BRICK, which will be issued to members of subreddits r/Cryptocurrency and r/FortniteBR, respectively. The project appears to be an immediate hit and has already attracted over 17,500 users, who made a total of over 20,000 transfers over the past month. 

However, as The Block reported previously, token project's growing popularity may be hindered by Ethereum's current limited throughput. The network can currently process around 10 to 20 transactions per second (tps), and suffers from fee spikes and network congestion. 

"It's unclear how to determine the best solution. There is a lot of code, a lot of documentation, and a lot of hype out there. But there are very few objective real-world reviews or comparisons of various products/implementations," the post said. "We need the Ethereum community's help to figure this out." 

The company also has some specific requests for the new scaling solutions: "Most existing scaling solutions focus on the exchange use case, which favors optimizing for transfers," the post said. "Many of these designs don't take into consideration the costs of obtaining tokens or entering the scaling system, which can be significant."
 
Reddit's intended use case has apparently turned out to be expensive. "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," read the post.
 
According to the post, developers have until July 31 to submit the proposal and all demos need to simulate Community Points usage for 100,000 users. "There is no prize if your solution is chosen or modified to meet Reddit’s need." 

About Author

Celia joined The Block as a reporter after earning her BA in the History of Science from the University of Chicago. Having spent years pondering over why 2+2 cannot equal 5, she is interested in the history and philosophy of mathematics, computation, and cryptography. She also had a very brief stint at Crunchbase News.