Reddit Plans To Give $5m In Cryptocurrency To The Community - From The CoinFront

Reddit, the community-based news and social bookmarking platform, has just raised $50 million USD in funding from a number of high-profile investors.

The investors, including Bitcoin fans Mark Andreesen and PayPal’s Peter Thiel as well as pop culture icons Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg, among others, were led by Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, the incubator where reddit formed.

What Are They Doing With The Funds?

“During all this time we have operated with a shoestring budget”, said reddit CEO Yishan Wong in a blog post. “This made us become efficient; it also meant that we were only able to work on essential features and were always understaffed.”

Reddit plans to use part of the investment funding to help build some new features which “you’ve been asking for that we haven’t always been able to get to as fast as we’d like”, but they also have another, more unique plan.

“We’ve long been trying to find a way for the community to own some of reddit, because it is your contributions that help to anchor the site and give it strength”, said Wong. And while they’ve tried several ways to do it, they’ve run into roadblocks along the way.

But reddit’s investors have pledged to give 10% of their shares back to the community. They’re working out the details, but Wong says he has a “crazy plan” to make it work.

KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS PLAN COULD TOTALLY FAIL

That’s the caveat Wong opened with in a post on Reddit discussing his blog post.

Nevertheless, their idea is interesting, especially to members of the cryptocurrency community.

The plan is to create a cryptocurrency backed by reddit’s shares, then distributing those shares among the community. That way, those who helped build reddit into what it is today can receive a reward for their contributions.

This is in stark contrast to public trading of other social networks, like Facebook for example, where a relatively small number of people benefitted compared to the number of people who contributed to building its community.

This idea has never been done before, but it does have intellectual precedent.

Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne has publicly mused about “cryptosecurities”, publicly traded stocks which would be processed through a decentralized network and recorded on a public blockchain-style ledger.

Wong called the process of putting together the details of this plan “technically, legally, and financially complex”, and they’re still in the early stages of figuring it out.

While he makes no promises as to the viability of this plan, or of the details behind it, having such a major presence on the internet become the first publicly traded entity could be a watershed moment in the advancement of blockchain technology.



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Reddit Plans To Give $5m In Cryptocurrency To The Community