What Reddit Is Looking For in the Great Ethereum Bake-Off

In Reddit’s current great bake-off competition, where 22 key players are battling it out for the chance to administrate Reddit community points on Ethereum smart contracts, the forum provider itself has various goals related to improving how it rewards users.

Here are some of the items that distinguish the best plans by innovative companies to tie Reddit community points to ERC-20 tokens in order to have these values run on an Ethereum blockchain in a way that modernizes this kind of platform gamification.

Right now, Reddit is limited to an agonizing 10 to 20 transfers per second! In evaluating all of the applications for the new community points arrangement, Reddit is seeing that top firms can provide many thousands of transfers per second, which will help the project to scale and accommodate things like point claims and more.

Think about that! It’s like replacing your current broadband with systems that can download an entire digital movie in a second. Being able to handle all of those points at near-simultaneous speed will help Reddit to handle the volume that is anticipated when the system is fully operational.

Digital security is also a paramount concern here.

Reddit wants to ensure that whatever option it chooses, users have total ownership of their assets. Sufficient digital security means that these holdings, and their related balances and transactions, cannot be forged or manipulated. Reddit is also wanting to ensure that random users can't block activity on the Ethereum blockchain from happening in a legitimate way.

One of the applicants getting the most attention is Syscoin with its quick settlement, trustless verification and other attributes. The Syscoin solution is built on a Matic layer 2 strategy, with great scalability and cost benefits. Then a proven base layer methodology approaches how to build the smart contract systems on solid ground, rather than just calling the blockchain the base layer in some vague way and moving on. At the same time, having a sovereign store of value in place on the Syscoin side is a valuable contribution to decentralized security and the access and convenience that these systems are trying to provide.

At the same time, firms are looking to help Reddit to scale up the project to an enormous user community.

While pilot projects may take on 10,000 or 20,000 users, eventually the chosen option will have to serve Reddit's entire user base of 430 million users per month. As mentioned above, that takes a good deal of throughput. Do the proposed systems have what it takes? It looks like they do…

ERC-20 tokens constituting Reddit community points will be kept in digital wallets, and in many cases, out of the digital fray of the globally connected Internet's crypto exchange infrastructure. Cold storage is safe storage.

With that in mind, companies are trying to come up with plans in which transfers and treatment of the community points will not “touch” the underlying assets, or require parties to dig into the actual digital wallet in order to perform those tasks that facilitate points dealing and transfers.

Another way to look at that is that companies are coming up with a frictionless user experience for community points earners, holders and traders. How well they do that will determine who Reddit chooses, and what the end result looks like.

Crypto fees are another issue that's bedeviling current programs. Reddit is seeing that firms like OMG can create community points platforms with zero fees, which is an enticing aspect of this competition.

Take a look at the systems vying for Reddit community points on Ethereum, and see what you think. Which ones stand the best chance of measuring up?