Reddit, cooperating with the Ethereum Foundation, has asked the ETH community for ideas to help scale its recently launched Ethereum-based ‘Community Points’ tokens.
In a post published on the r/Ethereum subreddit, which has over 460,000 subscribers, the firm asked users for help in finding a layer two scaling solution that will help it scale its community tokens, currently being distributed to around two million users via the r/Cryptocurrency and r/FortniteBR subreddits, to its over 430 million users.
The Community Points are tokens users can earn by getting upvotes on posts and comments the community finds valuable, and can later be used to purchase specialized GIFs and emojis on the platform. The post reads:
In conjunction with the Ethereum Foundation, Reddit is inviting Ethereum scaling projects to show the community how your scaling solution can be used to bring Community Points to mainnet. Our goal is to find a solution that will support hundreds of thousands of Community Points users on mainnet today, and can eventually scale to all of Reddit.
Reddit is looking for a scaling proof of concept that will give users full ownership of their Community Points, while maintaining decentralization and other requirements. Users have until Jule 31 to submit a proof-of-concept demo, and Reddit is looking to update the community by September.
The opportunity won’t come with any rewards, however, as the post points out that if Reddit uses or modifies a proposal, the only thing the user gets is notoriety. Ethereum has notably been looking at scaling techniques since its mainnet launched in 2015, with several proposals being debated.
While ETH uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm now, it is set to upgrade to the so-called Eth 2.0, which will use a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm and sharding. The highly technical update has no firm timeline, although some expect an initial phase to be released later this year. The overall update will be rolled out in several phases.
There are other scaling solutions for Ethereum. Decentralized exchange IDEX, for example, has been using an “unbounded” scaling solution called Optimized Optimist Rollup (O2R). Reddit pointed out in the post that these solutions don’t really work for it, as they are focused on exchanges and “don’t take into consideration the costs of obtaining tokens or entering the scaling system, which can be significant.”
Featured image via Unsplash.
