Reddit co-founder and executive chairman Alexis Ohanian is addressing rumors that the platform is adopting a new community points system that uses Ethereum-based tokens.
In an interview with Pomp Podcast host and Morgan Creek Digital partner Anthony Pompliano, Ohanian says Reddit has long been interested in crypto.
“The company had had some forays into crypto, and some of Twitter people had remarked on this when I came back in ‘14 as executive chair… There were some forays into it, but it was mostly still research. We had much more pressing things to handle at that point.”
The new community system will reportedly allow users to buy special memberships using decentralized community points stored on the Ethereum blockchain.
“If we know [Reddit Karma] works, where you don’t have any ownership whatsoever, it reasons to be that if you allow for a kind of ownership and a kind of decentralization to it, people would do it even more.”
Ohanian says the long-term value of Reddit is from its community, not from advertising. He also sees benefits in giving more rewarding experience to users.
“On Reddit, people will buy pizzas for strangers. The more that we can do to help communities and users strengthen their relationships to one another and make money in a way that they’re happy with, the more we win.”
Reddit is currently the seventh largest website in the US and the 19th largest in the world, according to the web data aggregator Alexa.