Founded by Steve Huffman, Aaron Swartz and Alexis Ohanian on June 23 2005, the San Francisco-based Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as “Redditors”) are allowed to submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members.
Posts on Reddit are organized by subject into user-created boards called “communities” or “subreddits”. Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site’s front page. Reddit administrators are employed to moderate these communities.
Reddit NFT Marketplace
Reddit is launching a new NFT-based avatar marketplace with will allow users to purchase blockchain-based profile pictures for a fixed rate. To buy these avatars, the company said that you need a crypto wallet. However, one’s credit or debit card should be enough, else one can use one’s Reddit wallet product to store them.
The social network is set to release 90 designs, the total amount of NFTs going for sale in this early-access phase being “tens of thousands.”
The company pointed out that a user can purchase one of its limited-edition NFTs to have licensing rights to use it on and off Reddit as an avatar. These rights aren’t as extensive as owning an NFT from Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club collection, which allows you to make merchandise or TV Shows based on the bored ape you own.
Reddit has partnered with Polygon, an Ethereum-compatible blockchain, to mint these avatars on-chain. You can use Reddit’s own blockchain wallet called Vault — which is available on the firm’s native app — to store and manage these NFTs. Presently, Vault is used to earn blockchain-based community points and spend them on special features like badges and animated emojis.
Reddit says that while NFT profile pictures is an early-stage blockchain project, it wants to explore more features with the tech.
“In the future, we see blockchain as one way to bring more empowerment and independence to communities on Reddit. Reddit has always been a model for what decentralization could look like online; our communities are self-built and run, and as part of our mission to better empower our communities, we are exploring tools to help them be even more self-sustaining and self-governed,” the company wrote in a statement.
Reddit has joined a long list of companies that are experimenting with NFTs. After launching NFT support on Instagram, Facebook recently ported some of those features to the blue app. After launching its digital art collection in May, eBay acquired NFT marketplace KnownOrigin in June. In May, Spotify started testing a feature that allowed some artists to promote digital collectibles on their profiles, and link-in-bio startup Linktree rolled out new features for creators like unlockable links for specific NFT collection holders. Expect more of these tests soon.
