This is a story about freedom, rebirth and corporate irresponsibility. But most importantly — this is a lesson about the importance of decentralization.
Just over a month ago, on October 18, Reddit announced they are sunsetting their blockchain-based monetization programme called Reddit Community Points (RCP for short) on November 8. Reddit had, once again disappointed its user base, by essentially rug pulling a token that they themselves had created 3 years ago.
It has been a week since $MOONS — Reddit’s community points for the cryptocurrency subreddit have been sunset. In many ways, this is the best thing that could have happened to Moons.
But first —
What were Reddit’s Community Points?
The Reddit Community Points (RCP) were initially promoted as a chance for community members to “own” a piece of their community. Community members would also participate in governing the community, through voting or creating proposals. This would effectively create self-governing communities and a greater sense of being in this together. Because Community Points are essentially ERC-20 tokens, they would have an actual value and can be exchanged for another cryptocurrency.
As you can imagine, people were rather hype on this idea, especially considering how users would earn their community points. Tokens would be distributed each month, to all members of the community with an active wallet, based on how many upvotes they have received during the last 30 days. The ratio would often differ from month to month depending on the total number of upvotes generated during that time. The more upvotes you got, the more $MOONS, $BRICKS or $DONUTS you would stand to gain at the end of the month.
What you did with your tokens was up to you. You could keep them in your vault and use them as governance tokens, since the more tokens you have, the more weight your vote would have in governance polls. Or you could simply exchange them on Sushiswap, and more recently on exchanges such as MEXC and Kraken.
What happened to the Reddit Community Points?
As you may have guessed, once reddit made the announcement that they are sunsetitng RCP — these tokens started dumping. Hard.
$MOONS — the community points for the /r/Cryptocurrency subreddit dropped over 90%, from around $0.35 to just $0.02 from its previous price — causing a massive backlash from the community.
For some of the most active community members, posting and earning $MOONS each month was their actual job. People were able to make a living off of earning $MOONS.
For example, a month before Reddit leadership decided to, once again dissapoint its users, the top contributors posting on r/CryptoCurrency were earning the equivalent of $4000 a month in $MOONS, simply by posting news, comments, and other content that would get upvoted on the subreddit.
Reddit then doubled down on $MOONS adoption by working with /r/Cryptocurrency moderators to get $MOONS listed on Kraken as well as other exchanges — just a few months before announcing they they are going to pull the plug. This is as close to a rugpull as it gets.
The Rebirth of Moons
November 8 came and went, but Moons didn’t really die. In fact, they bounced right back to pre-crash levels:
This was in large part due to the continued efforts of the /r/Cryptocurrency moderation team (volunteering members) not to be confused with Reddit admins (paid reddit employees — usually on the spectrum).
The period between October 16 and November 8 was a critical time, where vital decisions were made regarding future of Moons, and the ownership of the contract.
It was eventually decided that Reddit would relinquish ownership of the Moons contract and, and hand this over to the /r/Cryptocurrency mod team. What followed were a series of community-centric decisions that quite possibly made Moons 10 times better than before.
Prior to this, Moons were an inflationary token. Every month, more MOONS would be minted, based on the total amount of upvotes generated during that month. Because Moons were kicked off of reddit, this would no longer be the case — not a single more Moon is going to be minted from now on.
In addition to this, Reddit also has to now burn the over 60 million Moons that they had in their company wallets. Not only are Moons deflationary right now, but their total supply has been reduced from 125,969,899 + whatever was minted on a monthly basis, to a hard cap of 83,205,951.
The moderation team also ensured that all exchange listings would remain intact, meaning that Moons would remain trade-able via Kraken and MEXC.
Finally, there would not be any more changes to the Moons contract — making it fully decentralized.
It’s safe to say based on the market reaction that all of these factors combined, were taken very positively by the cryptocurency subreddit, and quite possibly put Moons in a much stronger position than they had ever been before.
The reality is — there was always a certain degree of concern over how Reddit would deal with the increasingly popular community points system. It’s clear that they chose the path of least resistance, at the expense of, once again pissing their community off.
While the Moons contract was owned by Reddit itself, it was clear that Moons couldn’t really evolve into something bigger. They were always at the mercy of a moody, greedy corporation who looks out for itself and for itself alone. Moons were handicapped by this, while at the same time trying to become their own thing through exchange listings.
Sometimes, you need a traumatic event in order to propel you further, and this is exactly what happened with Moons. Reddit’s announcement could have potentially ended Moons forever, but instead the community used this as a much needed catalyst in order to set Moons free from the clutches of Reddit and turn it into a true decentralised, community driven project.
The exact use case for Moons is still to be decided, but the community managed to turn this situation into a net positive, and it couldn’t have happened at a better time. Whatever the future holds for Moons — I’m sure it will be exciting. Enjoy your newly found freedom.
That’s all I have for today, show this article some love (👏) and follow me for more.
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Thank you for reading!
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