Thoughts on Reddit's Community Points scaling solutions

in #reddit4 years ago (edited)

Reddit's Community Points has been running in beta on Fortnite and Cryptocurrency subs for the last couple of months, on Ethereum's Rinkeby testnet. There's already been a surprising amount of interest, with tens of thousands of active users, particularly on the Fortnite sub. Easy to see why - there are real benefits and fun gamification around the tokenisation. Of course, to expand to Reddit's 400 million active users, we'd need to see some serious scaling solutions to work on Ethereum. A month ago, Reddit announced a call for proposals, and the submissions are in.

I'm blown away by the response from the dev community, there's 25 different solutions submitted! I haven't had the time to go through most of them, but I particularly like the Starkware and zkSync. In my opinion, zk Rollups are the greatest innovation in the blockchain space to be implemented, since the original Ethereum release brought smart contracts into play. Think of it as compression for blockchains. As a result, these solutions run 3,000 TPS on Ethereum, today, without any compromise on security or decentralization. All data is available on the main chain. There are other solutions, of course, sidechains, plasma, different chains syncing to Ethereum, a twist on zkRollup (called Validium) where data availability is off-chain etc. etc. By the way, Loopring is a great example of zk Rollups working today.

Reddit is going to announce in September which solution they will be adopting, with a broad release of Community Points to all of Reddit's users scheduled later this year. While only one of these (or maybe a few?) will be implemented by Reddit, this has also been a great demonstration for all dApps. USDT to OMG, Synthetix is moving to Optimistic Rollups, and I'd expect pretty much all popular Ethereum dApps to be on such scaling solutions within a year.

Where does this leave Hive? It is obvious Reddit has a far superior implementation for the concept of tokenizing content on blockchain, not to mention 400 million active users versus... 4,000? I'm sure you have many arguments for why Hive is still great, but I'm not going to bother, I have addressed all of those points over the last 4+ years. My only hope is that radical overhauls (which some of us have been calling for years!) are executed in short order.

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So these new rewards people get on Reddit (Gold, Silver, etc.) are based on crypto or is that sth else?

Yes, each sub distributes its own ERC20 token.