Reddit's move into web3 and its community points

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm jay bird and I believe that Reddit is going to change the world that's why I'm carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3. welcome to another episode everybody today myself Kyle and t-pan are deep diving on Reddit and I'll tell you why mostly because Reddit has sold 18 million nfts and onboarded over 14 million unique wallets into web 3. they are one of the largest crypto and web3

on-ramps today and so the question is how and why but I think most of us know that story we're going to talk about Reddit avatars where to talk about how they got here but most of us know that that's nothing new right it's been doing this since August when they first launched Reddit collectible avatars so what is new is what's coming next recently updated their terms of service to separate the definition between virtual goods and verified on chain virtual goods and now there's speculation that they are going to roll out Community points because on September 12th they are sun setting Community Awards and coins really

confusing that they called it community coins it's unfortunate Community coins is a web 2 program that's been in Reddit for a while along with Community Awards which is a program that ensures that contributors in reddit's ecosystem and communities get awards for their contribution well there's a lot of problems with that wouldn't you rather in return for your contribution get a token a fungible token which then there's much you can do with that token maybe you have governance and voting rights in the community that you're in maybe you can spend that token in the community that you're in to buy merchandise or to buy advertising in that Community or perhaps you can use that token to tip people in your

community or to show your recognition to people in your community there's so much you can do with a fungible token or what Reddit is calling Community points now right now only two communities have Community points within Reddit we're going to talk about today what is coming in the future and what we believe Eve is coming in the next few months because we believe that Reddit is going to get to 50 million unique wallets by the end of the year buckle up everybody this is the conversation you need to be listening to because you need to understand Reddit if you're in web 3 or if you're building in red 3 because they really are one of the best playbooks around before we jump in let's just take a minute to hear from our sponsor enjoy

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gonna be breaking that down because Reddit is shipping me be doing deep end how you doing my man hey congratulations on the little one you are an experience sure things are busy on Earth but it's a wild ride that's awesome I'm sure very fulfilling along really glad to be here thanks for always having me excited to talk about Reddit in terms of what they've done so far I know the web through Academy team and crew have definitely been following a ring thing going on there so excited to share notes share thoughts share maybe some light

predictions maybe not outside it's still I mean Reddit isn't as much of a speculative I feel like sort of topic and set of Collections and ecosystem versus your traditional nft ecosystem and coins I meant things like that there are definitely some interesting things that are on the horizon and and also with their literally hundreds of millions of users where there's a rich diversity of communities a rich diversity of you know ways that those communities interact and a rich diversity of probably how Reddit

will approach each of these subreddits types of communities personas and even those that for example don't decide to engage in the new way that they're sort of rolling out I like it teasing many things we're going to be talking about today because there's just so many exciting things going on at Reddit no Alpha maybe some speculation no on what's coming up there will be some stuff I definitely some speculation because I've got some thoughts on what they're doing next and what it's going to be coming out from them pretty soon I think in the next few months Kyle what was what was your prediction that you made at the uh Ender the beginning of this year yeah that Reddit would onboard it's a 50 million wallet by the end of 2023 I think they're at 14 million at

the wall or 15 million so they're getting more not fully but they're getting there getting close getting close we'll see we're gonna have to track that one closely things might be happening in the next few months to bring a lot more on chance they they do what we think they're gonna do teeth and you wrote a great article so we're going to talk about that as well all right well let me sort of frame the conversation today we've done a lot of thinking how to looking at the biggest brands that have come into web 3 and try to learn from them what's the Playbook what's the model that they use and how can other brands take that model and then replicate it and we believe that Reddit has been one of the leaders and the numbers tell the

story and they're one leaders because they have brought on over 14 million wallets at this point so fear that they are doing the hard work but they're also wanting leaders in their strategy and their tactics and the way that they have done it so we're going to talk about what Reddit has done so far today we're going to talk about Reddit avatars it just launched Gen 4 of their avatars last week so we'll touch on that now we're going to talk about like how has Reddit done this what have been the steps that they have taken how have they engaged and built a community in web 3 when they've got this web to socialize already bringing everybody over what are the lessons that we can take from this and then we're going to talk about what's next and the future of community

point tokenization we'll talk about the current communities that have Community points and then what we State might be coming out in the next few months and then we'll get into some each one of us will speculate and make some guesses as to where we think this will go by the end of the year Kai thinks 50 million wallets we'll get an update Kai we'll let you tell us if you still think 50 million wallets or if you want to change that number at all or where you think they're going to be at by the end of this year so we'll be a great conversation about really everything that Reddit has done but also understanding The Playbook and what we all can use from this for any brand T-Pain before we jump in though you've

been on the show before always excited to have you back but for those who don't know yet we'd love to have you just give yourself a brief introduction sure thing so I'm keep in or otherwise known as Thomas and I had a background on marketing things to Tech I'm based here in the Bay Area on the west coast of the US I've been here for some time and that worked at different startups big and small doing growth and marketing related roles sort of the standard you know quote unquote growth trajectory right how do things how do you make go number go up especially on the consumer apps of things for example one of the companies I worked at was Uber so really

interesting stories crazy times a lot of best practices that were made during my time there oh and we're jumped into web3 in early 2021 when things were really starting to hit the ground running in regards to very early signs of what Mass adoption could look like we're still to a degree in that phase but with some stronger foundations as a simple example what we're going to talk about today with Reddit and I just fell into it just got enamored with the space the dynamicism just the diversity of people that are involved the some of the smartest people in the world are doing problems building in this space and I just fell in love with it and so I just said screw it just gonna jump into this space full time and I do that in a few

different ways one is being an analyst of sorts in this space so I have a sub stack called web3 with t-pan it's in my bio check it out if you're interested in learning more about web 3 marketing and growth and Frameworks or if you're subscribed to 10 or 20 different newsletters that share with you headlines and want something a little deeper that's what I sort of read about I go one to two layers deeper in terms of peeling the onion any specific topic a little bit more leaning towards the nft and web3 side but also smattering of different things too so hopefully just adding another angle on top of all the great content that's been created otherwise I recently started all ethereum Foundation I have been sharing this pretty selectively so not

like you know on LinkedIn or like a big tweet thread or anything but in short the team I'm working on is a small Scrappy team called pollen Labs we're effectively a product Studio within the foundation um working to scale adoption that's a little bit more consumer focused to share the types of applications that can be built using the ZK protocols and efforts that have been being built internally so instead of just going to hackathons and sort of promoting all the different awesome work that's been done and things being built within EF we're also going skipping that step a bit and bringing it directly to the consumer with some products that we're building and ideating so really exciting pretty

early stage but there's going to be a lot more to come on that side so working on growth and marketing as a growth lead for that pod and a few other things but you know that's that's a short bit about me congrats t-ban I did not know the the new royalty ethereum Foundation that's awesome yeah yeah very fresh and still you know staying pretty low-key about it but you know in random situations like this definitely not even sure love it I love it doers be doing and t-pen is an ultimate doer appreciate it appreciate it let's look back at what Reddit has done so far let me just give some numbers and then Kai and t-pan I'll let you guys jump in and share your thoughts so we know that they have minted over 18 million avatars Reddit Gen 4 just

launched and I'm actually just looking at our dashboard and trying to see if I can get Gen 4 numbers the problem is our dashboard is only bringing up polygon because all the avatars were on polygon up until Gen 4 and now it's on optimism I believe so I actually don't have updated numbers I'm going to keep searching here and see if I can find them but no that's just including all numbers oh it is yeah huh okay well our dashboard shows 18 million unless Gen 4 got no uh I guess it says 18-5 now 18 million five hundred thousand so maybe there's only been 500 000 in Gen 4 so far which is why it doesn't look like it's a big a

big jump but basically the overarching view is reddit is done 18 million avatars minted so far they've done about just over 14 million unique wallets of those and we're pretty confident when it comes from Reddit that these are unique people because in order to buy one of these avatars you have to use your Reddit handle and your red is handle is usually somebody that has created a unique profile on Reddit so it's unlikely that these are there's obviously going to be some people that have duplicate wallets but not a ton and there's also been over 33 million in secondary sales despite the fact that

Reddit is not aiming to do secondary sales and they actually don't make it very easy to do secondary sales you have to take it to another Marketplace and we'll chat it with that t-pan what has Reddit done so far with avatars that has impressed you and given you uh sort of perk your interest this is a great question and a great way to sort of set the stage in regards to what's going on past present and future and just to add on to the number of collectible avatars that have been sold or that are currently in circulation and the number of folders or wallets but probably a closer to one-to-one ratio to your point of about 15 million Reddit Maui they haven't shared public numbers here or a couple years they've actually

historically I think the last time they did it they have like an annual Recap blog post so as of about 2021 it was estimated that there were about 861 million monthly active users Mau right so in terms of a percentage standpoint I mean I'm just going to do a rough like what what's 15 divided by 860. you know that's 1.7 of the monthly active user base as of 2021 right so it this is obviously 2023 assuming that number goes up probably getting closer to like a billion maybe monthly active users give or take who knows in terms of the actuals but you know want to stress that this is a very small percentage so

depending if there are certain tweaks made in regards to you know how they continue to promote this how they continue to encourage adoption of their Reddit Avatar profile pictures as well as digital Collectibles this number can increase quickly significantly and in other ways that we haven't really seen yet right so easy example right complete you know similar in terms of the fact that the social media platform and network but obviously different in terms of the type of content and how it's structured but threats right threads got to a hundred million monthly active users because they basically vampires or they AC just ported over a degree of

their right so very quickly in a matter of days instantaneously literally a couple of clicks so you know just take note of that right numbers are big they could be way bigger depending on what happens or they could just be as slow and steady you know sort of trajectory upwards so in regards to these Reddit collectible avatars you know for those that are more familiar with you know web3 native how it sort of works profile pictures this is effectively reddit's version of that and this actually launched not a long time ago but actually the fall of last year approximately August or so so almost a year ago and this past week was the fourth generation or the fourth wave

or release of these Reddit avatars and effectively you purchase these These are on polygon these are also in a custodial wallet set up by Reddit to make the onboarding process the purchase process and just how you can use these digital Collectibles as profile pictures a lot easier for your average Reddit user because they are not as web3 native so we've seen over the past year or so this number grows significantly a lot of thoughtfulness put into how these are positioned and also a very sort of traditional Concept in the tech world or web 2 but product Market fit and that's one thing I think is worth emphasizing

because it's it's been mentioned by the Reddit team themselves but also with understanding I'll read it as a social platform especially those are lit that may not be users or power users of the platform is actually very complementary to this digital collectible that could be a profile picture meaning Reddit is generally Anonymous first if you go on a forum or a subreddit or a specific topic on the social platform you actually see a lot of the usernames being like I don't know uh I mean I don't like you know myself because like I don't it's not fully doxed and also I don't really

use Reddit a lot anyway but for example this is a very old username like eight years old but my username is like a toothbrush why that used to be an aims free name for like you know when I was in my teenage years so don't ask me why I just thought it was sort of funny but that's what I choose the name that's nothing to do with me we all brush our teeth I hope right but I think you sort of get the point right so if you're already Anonymous might be all you rarely any first name last names you know which is a little bit more common more common on like Facebook even Instagram other things LinkedIn of course right there's different types of incentives and also the sort of affinity towards well if I'm

already Anonymous I want to represent who I am my interest where I sort of focus more my time on on Reddit maybe also be shown visually through that digital collectible or Reddit Avatar and people have been doing this by uploading pictures and whatnot but this is much more native and also creates this ecosystem of supporting creators and contributors to that Reddit ecosystem where they partner with various artists through these generations of Reddit Avatar drops so you start to see a diversity of not only the type of art based on that reddit's new which is their sort of little alien character mascot of mask of Wick yeah and quick for those that don't know

snoo is actually named as such because alexison live a very long time ago on a lot of podcast recording but the whole point of it being called snoo was to have people say what's new right so if you say that really quick it means what's new so Reddit was a place to share what was new what was interesting what was sort of maybe in the weird you know corners or areas of the internet to share animal pictures or you know anime topics or whatever it might be or cool art so you start to see a lot more interesting representations of your sort of preference interests the art you like through these Reddit avatars so I'll stop there but hopefully that gives a

little bit more of an overview of one how this really came to be about like this is still relatively new but it has it's not like this happened overnight right two you know what does product Market even look like for this and then also three a little bit more of history and like what happens already that sort of leans to this eventual Evolution that has happened so far as it pertains to Reddit avatars yeah thanks so much for that background T-Pain super helpful Kai do you have anything to add on what you've seen Reddit do so far I mean that was pretty detailed I think the big thing that I've noticed with Reddit is the in the way that they're using this technology is they're just using the technology the way it's supposed to be

it's not they've gotten rid of the whole speculative side of it and then just using it for something that people actually enjoy like like T-Pain said whether that's for the art or whatever just to show off and I think that's I mean that's the whole purpose of this and they're one of the first I think that I've actually done this in that way and that have done it at scale and so I think a couple good things they've done one they haven't focused around the speculative financialization of the whole thing and then two just they've abstracted away a lot of the just like web 3D blockchain type technology and I'm just using it for what it is which is a pfp it's like a way for people to you know show off who they are what they believe in et cetera and I think that's

why it's done so well and it's created to make a strong Community within the Reddit world and I think that's why it continues to do as well as it is and I don't see any reason why it slows down the other thing that I think is them Reach the numbers that they have is the price that they've set on these avatars they're not trying to sell pfps for one eth or half an eighth which were in the ridiculous prices that we saw during the bull market when you weren't buying a pfp you were buying a part of a hypothetical metaverse company or something like that with Reddit you're just buying a pfp and that's it and as tpan said there's product Market bid on that because people within Reddit value having a unique Avatar or pfp when

they're within Reddit because they're already it's part of their personality and part of their character and their identity in that space and so they've been selling these for anywhere from five dollars I think up to two hundred dollars but only a very few I think the majority ten dollars so eating that price indicates as well what the product is that you're buying it's set at a price that shows okay you can only you should only expect ten dollars of value from this which that is fair for an avatar within a social media platform yeah I think that's a great Point around the price points where it's more realistic than where the future is going and in regards to price points and supply and

how that works with nfts and what their respective goals might be there might be certain trades or collections that will be very small quantity but much more high price range to show how premium it might be but also for the super fans but for the masses if your goal is to sort of have a brand alert for Ray especially from IP standpoint the goal is to cast as wide of the net and accessible other than that as possible so we're seeing a lot more of that leaning happen here which makes sense much larger audience on Reddit in terms of absolute value the other fun thing and we've seen versions of the more on chain or at least within the sort of web 3 native side but Reddit makes it more easy just with their the way they created this and sort of built

their sort of platform to support this is when you purchase an avatar it typically consists of several elements right so I bought a cool cat digital or Reddit avatar for ten dollars it was an addition of 2500 and it's basically the blue cat character with a little chunks which is the little milk carton character and there's actually five components to that so one is chugs the little sort of friend that's a milk carton on top of the cat's head two is the pants three is the cat head four is I'm trying to look at it it is the actual face and facial features that are very iconic for Cool Cats and then it's the fifth one is the T-shirt right you

could actually mix and match so there's some version of composability with all these different traits and if you have another Avatar you can for example have the cool cat's head but maybe there's like this other accessory that you really like and actually layer that on top so this is actually a pretty cool feature that Reddit has introduced to its Reddit Avatar ecosystem so if you're someone that wants to create a unique character you would actually purchase multiple avatars and then just create a very aesthetically pleasing sort of version that's a matchup of some of these elements so you know when you talk about that larger theme of co-creation or co-curation this is actually happening and it's very accessible to see how that even looks like which is

pretty darn cool t-pan when you purchased your cool cat did you purchase it for the purpose if you needed an avatar or you just experience try to experiment and experience this new Gen 4 what was your reasoning yeah a little bit of all the above see the purchase experience I actually tried to get in on the Gen 3 avatar drop but there was a fair amount of speculation at hand because that was when the sort of you know nft liper Community started to be like okay you know like these collections are gonna you know be worth a lot of these are like in Gold so they're gonna be worth a lot blah blah blah and I think there's just a larger level attention being brought towards it because you know how

this space sits it on our side of town this has happened in the past 24 48 hours right the the coins on base L2 for example but that led to a lot of sort of technical issues just when there's a large influx of demand the checkout process was pretty messed up Etc so a little bummed out I couldn't just genuinely experience it but I wanted to experience this in Gen 4 I purchased this a couple days after just all the frenzy which was just much more level-headed than previous generations however in gen 3 I actually got a couple of avatars that were actually free so they do this every every so often where there's like editions of a hundred thousand for people that just want to experience the Reddit

paying anything and you can tell that these are actually on chain on polygon because they have this little sort of on the bottom left-hand side the sort of diamond symbol ask thing saying it on chain so that was pretty cool I saw it but I just want to go through the purchase experience that also support Cool Cats you know profile picture is still supporting the cats we love the cats and just seeing what it looks like to go end to end on that front um also see you know potentially what happens with a brand like cool cats as it pertains to expanding their IP but they're not alone there's guitars by Micah Johnson they had a collection several other sort of web 3 native artists also had collections on PR Guitar Man of Nyan Cat as has had a partnership with Reddit for some time in

previous generations too so you know there's definitely sort of uh this overlap slowly and even more so between the sort of web 3 Natives and also potentially the Reddit web3 curious these Partnerships are great because they enable a community to come into Reddit or a community that's already within Reddit to support a creator that they care about and also enables an opportunity for creators to make money now in the case of some of the partners like I know that they've done a partnership with the NFL around the Super Bowl like obviously they're not trying to make money there but in the case of some creators they Venice it greatly from the opportunity and I know that Reddit talked recently about how there's been about a million

dollars that has flowed back to less than 100 creators so it's not like we're talking about a whole bunch of creators here and this was before gen 4. I also just want to mention quickly you t-pin talked about how there are some people selling on secondary markets but it's not the focus so like of the 14 million plus unique wallets only about 50 000 wallets have interacted with Reddit nfts on secondary marketplaces so it shows you most people are buying these to hold them not trying to speculate on although as you did mention there was that one point when there was lots of speculation and you couldn't avoid it okay I want to move on to what's next and Community

point tokenization t-pin do you want to set the table for us here on what's happening with Community point tokenization maybe what's happened so far with moon and with brick and then what we or we think might be coming in the future yeah sure so tokenization at Community points to set the stage Community points is something that was actually announced again about a year ago back in August 2022 early August so literally almost a year ago and effectively the rollout and the sort of goal of this was to create more value and to create a richer ecosystem around contributions that have been made in these subreddit communities

so as it is today when you are let's say a very active and contributing Community member for let's just say our flat which means like the sub Community cryptocurrency because you're using them as an example because they're doing some interesting stuff that will probably be to some hypotheses and ideas from our side you know you basically get karma which is upvote so that's great you know social validation is one of the most the better feelings in life especially in this more technologically leaning world right some my likes or retweets or comments or go to you on Reddit that's that's good and no it's a feedback loop showing that you are providing um people are validating that right

however at the end of the day that's somewhat limited and several years ago in response to that Reddit created something called Awards right so this is something that is basically a richer version of an upvote and sometimes those users who award those Awards to those contributors might have to pay for that or they use coins and things like that however at the end of the day that's more or less just a richer version of an upvote to show like to say thank you so with that Community points were announced and sort of shared about a year ago so what are some of these components so one these points are

effectively going to replace these Awards and supplement Karma which will still exist right that's the sort of Reddit native version of like something has value so we'll go into more detail on that two these Community points can be used to unlock special features within that Community or subreddit so for example you might have specific feature access like you could create comments that are GIF GIF enabled while if you don't have enough Community voice you can't do that you're going to do text based as an example you can actually have governance or you can use your balance as a way to show reputation and have a little bit more influence when you're having Community votes you can use these points as a way to beat

prizes for Community contests or content contests or trivia things like that so basically over the past couple of years actually the cryptocurrency subreddit has been testing this so this is you know been happening for some and likely in some form of communication with the Reddit team or the Reddit team has been monitoring this so moons is our cryptocurrencies community points or sort of token and this was actually launched back in 2020 on arbitrary test net when Arbitron itself was on testnet but they were testing out these different incentive mechanisms and sort of building out better feedback loops to sort of understand how this can be

rewarded how people are using people were sort of how the reception was towards such a thing and basically what from what we can tell this is going to be rolled out in larger formats so how do we know that a couple of things one it was sort of shared more internally I read it but got picked up in larger concentric circles to a small degree there was somewhat a sleuth basing notice that in the terms of use for Reddit as a platform they change some language what did they change specifically in section 5.1 I'm quoting this they say you may be able to earn claim purchase sell or give certain

virtual avatars Goods currencies or items that could be cryptographically verified on a public blockchain through services in accordance with the previous terms and Reddit terms so basically you can start buying selling trading whatever Reddit avatars tokens if there are any in the future things like that coming from Reddit right and this time very closely with the Ripple and SEC hearing that is still ongoing but there has been some more clarity it seems that Ripple itself probably isn't a token based on how it was sold and things like that maybe but specifically from a

secondary Market standpoint it's more likely or it seems that it's not going to be the case so Reddit changed from a timing perspective this language at a similar point in time additionally one of the product managers or product leads I mean last minute saying that they were re-working the awards system as well as coins and the premium subscription so this happened maybe you know 24 40 hours apart and this all happened after that Ripple SEC hearing now try to just say like one literally led to the other but the timing is notable they were very close right within days and basically announced what I shared about that system they're actually sunsetting that

starting September 12th and they you know TBD are going to be sharing more details in the coming months about what will replace that whole system that has been around for several years and from what we can assume to a degree that may or likely will be related to these Community points rollout that has been in the works behind the scenes for about a year now there's a great summary there for us tpan so much to capture love that you actually dove into section 5.1 of the terms Kai you want to jump in here yeah I mean I really don't have much of that I can compare and basically went through everything there I think these Community points I've been around for a while in

terms of moon and the bricks and they've talked a lot about wanting to make this something bigger and I think originally Moon and Bricks because this has been around for a little while was on ethereum I think back in the day and then they had mentioned they were going to put it on L2 and finally went on Arboretum Nova and so I think they're finally at a place where like the attack enables them to go bigger with this and then the fact they already have the tech basically worked out in terms of their wallets because they've now practiced that and tested that with the vault as they call it with the nfts it seems like they're they should be ready to to start to bring this out to the masses whether it's like everyone all at once or a few at a time I'm not sure but it seems like

everything's kind of ready for that and the infrastructure is all there so we'll see what happens but I'm excited for them to to kind of get this going I do have a question though T-Pain and we sort of touched on this in our Discord last week why does Reddit want to do community points like what's the big benefit is is it a big benefit to them is it just it's an added benefit to the users what's the additional reason that they would want this to be like an on-chain point system and why they would get rid of all the other stuff and bring in this instead yeah totally and we had a great sort of async conversation on the web 3 Academy Discord in regards to this and I definitely have punches and we'll see if they do share more information about sort of that thought

process maybe after it's rolled out because it does seem like they are open to having certain members of their team talk to there are some members of the on the team that shared a lot more background info Reddit avatars on an episode with Carly Riley for overpriced jpegs definitely recommend that if you're really curious to hear more firsthand about their point of view pretty interesting stuff so if I ever read right first of all I imagine information is qualitatively and quantitatively data informed right so they have access to a match saying they've been around for you know well over a decade now have you know hundreds of millions if not closer to a billion

monthly active users billions if not even closer to a trillion a sort of content data points with thousands and thousands of communities and they have a very good idea of what their social graph looks like right social graph meaning what is the relationship between different community members communities people who are in multiple communities and how they interact right what is a high quality sort of user Community member on Reddit versus a low quality member and also thinking through okay what's the next step how does Reddit continue to grow and I imagine some of that data is telling them that the next

stage for Reddit to grow and be relevant along with understanding where technology is headed is providing some ownership and empowerment and autonomy back to the community itself and that could look like the form of empowering these communities to provide them the tools of what is best for the that in terms of showing what that value is and they have publicly mentioned that product lead shared that in the announcement they've received very consistent feedback about that Awards and badges sort of feature so people like that because it was more than an

upvote but there were two particular pieces of feedback they consistently heard over the years one rewards were very cluttered and they felt very cluttered so if you've been on Reddit you sort of see like a really good post or a piece of content actually just has like next to the title like all these little badges like five or ten or something like that and you're just like okay cool great piece of content but like what does that mean you know besides that it's good well you know not that much to be honest and there are over 50 types of different awards that could be provided or you know gifted to that content creator or contributor right the second thing was that redditors wanted Awards to be more valuable for the recipient because if you receive that great you have Online

Reddit clout but like so what what you're going to feed your family with that like ah probably not right so I think all those data points qualitatively and quantitatively told them or suggested that there is something to be done here to provide more value and create potentially a sort of positive feedback loop to them so hypothetically what could happen here if you start empowering these communities like or cryptocurrency with moons well you could create a more robust ecosystem right if executed and tweaked in a way that sort of makes it a win-win-wit so with the moons right and this happens today and this is on their

Wiki so they have like a moons or cryptocurrency Wiki of like how it even works you know what are some things you can do today the history of their voting proposals and governance proposals over time it's pretty cool because it's basically an archetype and prototype of like effectively a dow right well like a Reddit Centric one and also a sort of model for other large communities to be like okay you know this worked well for our cryptocurrency this you know didn't work so well or this might be different because we're like an animal lovers focused subreddit right so like we have to you know be thoughtful about how we approach X but you know people today could use Moons for as an example obviously mention things like events trivia Etc it could be used just

naturally for like tipping and whatnot you could just send that over to other contributors beyond the standard Badges and awards you could actually use and burn for advertising space on the subreddit right and this doesn't necessarily have to be a Community member you can be an Advertiser and purchase moons and pay whatever that price is maybe it's Dynamic maybe it's flat two to advertise there right just as an example so with that stud you are starting to separate but show a very strong relationship between the token which shows value to the community but also how it could be externally valuable

in terms of How It's permissionless where you know someone like myself don't use Reddit I can just purchase that token use that token in certain ways if I were an Advertiser I can use that token in certain ways either by purchasing it or by being a token sit right so this gets pretty interesting where let's say I think those are you know people are pretty like crackings pretty active or like has a good relationship with that community so let's say I'm cracking right and I'm like hey we need more user right or like we want more people who are like X so we want to promote this product well you could you know of course accept you know all the cryptocurrencies today or like a lot of the larger tokens but let's say you're like hey we just want to you know access

this community or like we want to do a promotion here what if you accepted moons our cryptocurrency is I don't know how large it is off the top of my head but you know at least hundreds of thousands if not maybe in the low million wrong in terms of the number of users well if you say hey we accept I don't know the exact conversion rate here if it's a lot or little but let's say hey sign up for an account and also burn a thousand moons tokens and we will give you this promotion right let's extend that to something else let's say chewy right you know pet food pet accessories Etc very big company let's say they want to go to to our all which is basically like cute pet photos and things like that what if they had a promotion where they were to accept you

know whatever their communities token is let's say dollar sign pet right and they say exchange 10 000 pet or twenty dollar promo coupon and we will also put you you know in the running for a chance for your pet to be see your your pet's photo in awe to be featured on our home page right so you sort of add the standard like promo strategy but you also have like a little other parrot or like fun surprise and Delight moment you know for a very lucky individual instead of individuals so you can start seeing this ecosystem being much more Dynamic specs of that permissionlessness and again moons going back to them they had a very specific point that developers can build and accept and also you know use that

token which is the whole point right building a much richer ecosystem so where does Reddit benefit from all this right because I'm talking about the users the contributors the community members who earn that token and now have a lot more they could do with it which is the point and then you have like advertising ecosystem Partners you know other players that are like wait a second this is like potentially like a huge you know acquisition Channel or like a place where I could you know test things out right and see what works it doesn't work you know pretty low lift pretty low cost relative to spending like a million dollars on Instagram because everyone and their mom does that if you have large enough marketing budget right so you start seeing a version of this you know positive feedback loop where well to get more of

this token or if like the perks of having this token or being a contributing member are strong enough and enticing enough you actually want to continue providing value back to that ecosystem that you can earn that token from so our cryptocurrency are off our comedy or jokes or whatever it might be or are video games so you start seeing the stronger engagement Loop you know there are going to be Kinks and I do want to talk about that later I think there's a very good call out earlier today on Twitter but you start seeing like how this could really be a win-win-win for the community or you know other ecosystem Partners whether advertisers or whatever else it might be and then also for Reddit itself at least in terms of Engagement and the last piece there is if those advertisers

start seeing some versions of success to the Token I think there's going to be also some version of them actually directly advertising more within the community as well or being a more active participant in the community in certain ways and we'll see how that evolves and looks like over time if this does really show signs of success I think even if Reddit doesn't make money off of these tokens anyway which it doesn't appear that they're are set to do any of that I think what you're saying it brings more attention back to Reddit right read its entire goal is we want eyeballs on our content we want people coming back to the reddit website and um this creates an experience like really no other on any other social app and like you said it creates more engagement probably more

commitment because people can earn until people come back to Reddit more than they do any other social platform and then Reddit can monetize that and however they do right they have their premium product they have obviously advertising Etc I mean all those things will benefit just from people coming back to Reddit more frequently which I think is what these tokens are set up to do so it's just a marketing tool essentially and then a great ux ideally for all the users so I don't know that's kind of why I see it tpan would you agree on that yep yes I think especially let's just say whatever I don't know what they're calling like phase one of this community Point rollout right increase adoption get a larger sample size of how people are using it other communities are using it what ecosystem partners are either organic technically

or either you know from the sales side of things or BD side of things like who you're talking to what's their sentiment about that or like any of them actually just diving in being like wait this is like an amazing acquisition play right like yes it sounds scary we're it's a little bit of like no no known but like if we play this out and we're a first mover like as a you know again at least think about some like a growth and marketing standpoint like there's a huge Arbitrage to be made right like you're gonna literally make news if you're like a larger Fortune 500 brand that like starts accepting tokens right and like from everything we can tell you know especially in the US like from a regulatory standpoint like it's probably fine right this is the equivalence to a large degree unless it's my personal

opinion like this is like you know Delta accepting you know Starbucks rewards points right for you know however they create their conversion value it's just like not like a very strict World Network and by the way Delta does have a lot of Partnerships I think like Airbnb lit whoever I just met just Starbucks right where like if you spend a dollar on Starbucks you actually earn you know one mile on Delta Airlines and like they're like the only airlines that does like Beyond just the I find it super interesting because I just wonder like their point of view versus like a United Airline or something like Delta does these like cross industry promotion Partnerships well like your standard United Airlines Alliance thing right so like this is like not unlike that where you know

there is arbitrage to be made in my opinion and another example of this that I always just think so fondly upon the day when I was more just like in Performance Marketing for anyone that's been around for a minute like when Instagram came out with anyone that advertised on Instagram just saw like insane efficient numbers you're like oh my gosh I'm getting so many installs or purchases or whatever because it was so cheap because you were much earlier right it's the same thing as like you bought this nft that but because like maybe it's public information but people just don't do their homework or they don't put in the effort they're like wait like a16z they raised 20 million with like a16 the leading this in the bear market like I'm just gonna buy this NFP because like everyone's gonna

realize the same information and you're like it's gonna pop right like whether long term it does or not it's a different thing same thing here where it's just Arbitrage from an information standpoint where it's like public but you know who's going to be a little braver to dip their toe in the water right so another brief thing I just went on our cryptocurrency first of all they have 6.6 million members I think or something like that a lot more than a few hundred thousand so just you know FYI so again if you're like crypto product and you accept moons I'm not saying 6.6 million people have moons or enabling them but like that's a big marketing play like that's really hard to ignore if your goal is to like make number go up in terms of active users or

like higher quality usings well you know someone that's a you know that's the other thing right answers are someone that earns this type of token means that they're knowledgeable about that topic they're a regular contributor to that topic they provide high value I value and the kotlin itself is you know high quality for the respective community members so if viewers to you know Market to people who have this token answers are they're probably higher quality users in general they're engaged with the topic they're knowledgeable they care about it right so let's say you're a video game right and you want to get more users like will likely be more active and you know you

have a really good game well wouldn't you want to get like good Gamers or like people who if you know you can hit it off with them they're going to start promoting the out of your game right and for free you more or less you just accept their token for whatever it is that you want to do like get or leave beta access right and you and for early beta access you want higher quality users people who are more engaged people who would give you feedback so why wouldn't you want to go to Reddit to be like hey I want to accept this token because the people who have this token have a okay not it's not obvious 100 but like they're likely to be like hardcore Gamers that really care about gaming as a whole right so that's just something to think about as an idea so going back

to going on at cryptocurrency our cryptocurrency there was actually when I went there so basically saying Community points are on mainnet with three points one may that means real blockchain to earn and spend points like you do now so you can use that currently like with special memberships with certain features you know within the Reddit Community things like that Reddit pays the network fees for these transactions so specifically within the community within subreddit right not like if you want to trade you know outside of Reddit and then three tips require Network fees because basically you're transferring or sending moves token to other contributors within the network so it's notable that if you

get go on to our cryptocurrency on Reddit like that pops up right they're being very clear that this is live and it's a thing within that subreddit there's just so much potential to this when you start to extrapolate out where this can go right now we only have two communities with Community points in our cryptocurrency with moon and our fortnite with brick what do you guys think happens for the next few months the rest of the year where do you see do you think we'll get caught do you think we'll get the 50 million unique wallets where do you see this going it's tough to say we'll get to 15 million I mean the fact that we're at 14 I think it's 14 million right now unique wallets and we were halfway through the year and

that's just on the nft side of things that's not counting anything to do with Community points so can we double that line of the year I mean we're on track to do that I'm not sure for sure if it will happen we'll have to obviously keep launching new things but so I mean maybe we can reach 25 million just on the nft side the avatars and then if they actually do launch points in Q3 which is what I mean T-Pain is spectating on I'm hoping they do as well and it kind of makes sense they will depending on the size of which you know who they launched that to I think that generates probably more wallets than the avatars if they actually were to watch this across a bunch of different communities because some of these communities are millions right and of course if you're a part of

that community and you can earn value from participating in that Community like it's a no-brainer that you're gonna activate your wallet and and start doing it that way so I mean I think that the community points will bring in much much larger numbers than these avatars I just don't know at what scale they're going to launch that so that's kind of the big the big question for me is what happens when they launch community points like fully is it fully or is it just like to a few and do they slowly let that go out because I think that's like the next the next big thing for them I think it will bring in tens of millions pretty quickly so we'll see I don't know but there's definitely potential for sure they're definitely going to be the biggest by the end of 2023 the only one that maybe

can surpass them is World coin let's see uh in terms of law yep yep that's a good one in terms of another Contender for the rest of the year quick thoughts on my side overall agree with what Kyle was mentioned just as a point of comparison or just like to think about you know assuming things hold pretty steady even from the Reddit standpoint over the past 30 days or so we saw the number of collectible Avatar holder wallets go from about 12.3 million to 14.9 million right not saying it's going to be exactly the same rate of growth but it's been fairly steady and like if you were to extrapolate that about like let's say 2.5 for the rest of the month we could do the math by the end of the year we'd probably get close to you know 25 million or more there

might be more launches maybe larger brand Partnerships et cetera that could accelerate that and then to the point of community points it very likely will not be all at once but you know just giving a quick idea of the size of some of these subreddits the largest communities I already mentioned cryptocurrency is a 6.6 million and that's like not even top 100 I think or that's yeah top 100 maybe like top 80 or so on top 75. you know the first one is R funny 51 million people two is ask Reddit so learning and education patient 42 million members three is gaming 38 million members right not saying that it's going to be like flipping on a switch but you know

assuming a certain percentage of those are active users you know assuming that you know a certain number of the top communities activate and sort of really you know thoughtfully hopefully you know bring this out you sort of get this like a version of a like switch sort of like how threads went from sort of zero to 100 million right but hopefully in a way where you start building a very robust and thoughtful ecosystem and I think the last thing to consider is the quality of content who does this incentivization this and with you know a classic example with gaming you know 2021 2022 with actually infinity and you know now they've rebamped a lot of stuff but like anything with incentivization how does that change the quality of content easy example that may happen and there will

need to be guard rails thoughtfulness you know more rules set up to measure quality versus just like quantity here is like X right here Twitter with you know the Creator royalties or some sort of the revenue share here so there are individuals and people who are just getting into all the replies and just trying to get as many impressions as possible to qualify for that Creator payout I respect the Hustle but you know to what degree does that sort of decrease the overall quality of content right and like the value that you get from such a platform that could happen on Reddit as well so how do you sort of make sure the incentives are thoughtful and still maintain so the larger these communities the larger the number of people not

necessarily Bad actors but they just have different incentives than people who really want to just provide quality information and opinions and thoughts and content well one thing's for sure we're all going to be keeping eye on the rollout of community points because I think that is just going to be a model for communities to bring tokens into the way that they interact online as we move from online dog chain and just tremendous potential it within Reddit outside of Reddit I'm just so excited before we wrap here I want to give a shout out to the builders Collective I see three of you guys in this Twitter space shout out to Solana and epic style you guys are doers we respect you thanks

for showing up today and tpan I got one final question for you are you going to switch your cool cat PSP to your new budgie oh no you've seen those comments uh that this huge threat apology I still like it's just so funny I love the cats forever and ever and I always give them credit for being the community that really made me understand the concept of you know community and how important that is in general um and also especially in web 3 so it's always been very close I have a huge huge budget band it doesn't look like it from the profile picture you know we'll see we'll see let's just say I'm rooting for the big talk I got my old a decent amount of stuff I'll just put it that

way Luke is the goat 11 I love it well we've got a rapport coming out pudgy this Thursday so watch out for that everybody that'll be a good one breaking down all of what they've done and what they've done to what's coming up next thanks so much for listening everybody tpan thanks so much for joining us always an absolute pleasure to have you on the show love it thank you for having me have a great day everybody thanks so much thank you for listening to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web3 insights so you can confidently

build and invest in web 3. make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one