Reddit’s Modest Investments in Bitcoin and Ethereum

The social network Reddit holds an “insignificant” amount of Bitcoin and Ethereum on its balance sheet, invested from surplus reserves. This is stated in the annual report to the SEC.

The organization indicated that it may continue this practice.

The investments did not exceed the threshold for disclosure in the document.

The company also used ETH and MATIC as payment for certain virtual goods.

“Our investment policy requires board approval for any investments in cryptocurrencies,” the report states.

Reddit explained that it limited its investments to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and “any other cryptocurrency” that regulators like the SEC and CFTC would not consider as a security.

Previously, the social network implemented initiatives such as avatars on Polygon and Community Points.

The latter was launched in May 2020 in beta testing to reward users for posting content. It utilized ERC-20 standard assets based on Ethereum.

To scale Community Points, the platform used the Arbitrum layer-two solution. Participants in subreddits received different tokens. For instance, in the r/Cryptocurrency thread, these were MOONS, while in r/FortniteBR, they were BRICKS.

On October 17, 2023, Reddit announced the winding down of the program. The team cited unreasonably high resource costs for the initiative and suggested the existence of more scalable solutions for loyalty rewards.

Earlier in the same month, Reddit admins were accused of insider trading with Community Points tokens.