What are Community Points?
Community Points are a way for Redditors to own a piece of their favorite communities. As a unit of ownership, Points capture some of the value of their community. They can be spent on premium features and are used as a measure of reputation in the community.
Get rewarded for your work People earn Points by contributing to the community, for example by submitting quality posts and comments. Based on these contributions, the community ultimately decides how many Points each person receives.
Hoard your Points, or put them to use Save your Community Points, or use them to access exclusive community features such as badges, custom emojis, and GIFs in comments.
Complete control, like Bitcoin Your Community Points exist on the blockchain, independently of Reddit, where they can only be controlled by you (just like Bitcoin!). Neither Reddit nor moderators can take your Points away or decide what you do with them. It’s all up to you.
For the community, by the community Community Points are a tool for communities to customize in their own way. They choose what to call their Points, what they look like, and how they are used in the community. We are looking forward to working with communities to see what is possible for them to do with Points.
Memberships
Use Community Points to get a Special Membership in that subreddit. Memberships give you access to several premium features:
Badges: Personalize your presence on the subreddit and add a highlighted color to your username.
Animated emojis: Express yourself in a way that words can't, with emojis custom to that subreddit.
GIFs: Embed GIFs directly on Reddit, inside your comments.
When people spend Community Points, the Points don't go to Reddit. Instead, the Points are "burned" (destroyed). This makes everyone else's slice of Points larger, thus rewarding the entire community.
People who don't have Community Points can also buy Memberships in dollars. In this case, Reddit will burn some Community Points on their behalf.
Tipping & Transfers
Community Points can be gifted, tipped, and transferred between users. Leave a tip If someone makes a great post or comment, you can tip them with Points. Just tap on their user avatar or Points balance and choose the option from the menu.
Send them Community Points can also be transferred to other Redditors who have created a Vault, or to any Ethereum blockchain address.
Reputation & Voting
See who’s been around a while Right now, it can be hard to tell who has contributed the most to a community just by their username. By displaying balances next to usernames in comment threads, Community Points make reputation more transparent.
With great power comes great responsibility
In subreddits that have Community Points, polls have two sets of results:
The normal count, where one member gets one vote.
The weighted count, where members get one vote for every Point they have.
By giving weight to votes, Community Points let a community see how core contributors feel about a question or decision.
Can someone buy the vote then? No. To keep things fair, a person’s weight in a poll is capped by the total number of Points they've ever earned. Even if they receive additional Points from tips or transfers, their vote can never exceed the number of Points they have actually earned themselves.
Vault
The best way to view, spend and claim your Points is from the Vault right inside the Reddit app. Advanced users can use other Ethereum tools if they wish. Manage your points In your Vault, you can view your Community Points from multiple subreddits, claim any new Points you’ve earned, and spend them on things like Special Memberships.
Behind the scenes When your Vault is created, it generates a public address and a private key. The public address is your address on the Ethereum blockchain where your Community Points are stored. The private key is the only way to access and use your Community Points. If you lose your private key, you could lose access to your Points, so it is very important to back it up. See the Backup and Recovery Options below. Have complete control Only you control your private key. Reddit only knows your public address, so we can check your balance and give you new Points. We can’t take your Points away or do anything with them without your explicit permission.
Points are public Because Points are on a public blockchain, your balances and transactions are public and tied to your Reddit username.
Backup & Recovery
It’s essential to keep your Community Points safe, so we’ve created a few ways to secure them.
The private key that controls your Community Points is stored on your phone. That means if you don’t have a backup and you lose your phone, you won’t be able to access your Community Points. (Even Reddit can’t help you.)
To secure your Points, you can create a backup in one of two ways:
Store a secure, encrypted backup of your private key on Reddit. You’ll need to use a password that’s different from your Reddit password.
Manually protect your Vault, by generating a twelve-word Recovery Phrase that you’ll store in a safe place, such as a password manager.
Never give anyone else your Vault password or your Recovery Phrase. Reddit admins will never ask you for them either.
Distribution
Ok, now it’s time for the nitty-gritty details... Community Points are distributed monthly based on contributions people make to the community. Reddit karma provides a basis for measuring people’s contribution, but the final decision is up to the community. Making a list, and checking it twice Every four weeks, Reddit will publish a list of how much karma each user earned in the community during that period, as a proposed score of their contribution. After this, the community has 1 week to review the list and propose any changes, if it wants. To propose a change, publish an alternative list and create a poll to have the community approve it. If the poll meets the minimum quorum and passes (by Points), it becomes the official contribution score (except in case of significant bribery). In case of multiple polls passing, the one with the most Points cast in favor is used as the official result. Claim your points For a user to claim their Points, their Vault (or an external Ethereum wallet) sends their contribution score on their behalf to a smart contract on the blockchain, which verifies and issues the Points. From the time the final data is published, people have 6 months to claim their Points, before the claims expire. Many ways to contribute Each month, a portion of Community Points goes to people who contribute to the community in other ways. Moderators get a 10% share, Reddit gets 20%, and another 20% will be reserved for the broader Reddit community. These percentages are based on the amount of Points claimed by users in that round.
Distribution over time The total amount of Community Points distributed each month decreases over time and eventually reaches a maximum cap. Initially, 50 million Points will be distributed based on karma earned in the subreddit to date. Then, over the first year, another 50 million Community Points will be distributed. Over time, the amount distributed every cycle will continue to decrease so that the total number of Points will approach a maximum cap of 250 million. Burn and churn In addition to the regular distribution, half of each month’s burned Community Points are reintroduced into the next month’s distribution. This helps ensure that there are new Points to distribute, even after the maximum cap has been reached.
On the Blockchain
Community Points exist on the Ethereum blockchain, which uses similar technology to Bitcoin to guarantee that ownership and control rests with you.
Community Points are stored as standard ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, so they’re interoperable with existing blockchain tools.
Ethereum is a public blockchain that Reddit doesn’t control.
Community Points are owned pseudonymously. Nothing on the Ethereum network connects to your real name or real identity.
Why the Ethereum blockchain? Ethereum is a general-purpose blockchain with smart contracts that enable programmable tokens, like Community Points. How is this built? On Ethereum, Community Points are run by a suite of smart contracts that manage balances, distribution/claiming, and purchasing memberships. The smart contracts also leverage existing parts of the Ethereum ecosystem, such as ERC-20 token standards. The smart contracts have been reviewed and audited by Trail of Bits, an independent blockchain security firm. What is gas, and who’s paying for it? Transactions on the Ethereum network cost “gas”, which are micro amounts of Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency (Ether). Since most Redditors do not have Ether already, Reddit will cover their cost of gas for now, through meta-transactions and the Gas Station Network. (This only applies when using Reddit Vault to access Community Points. Using other Ethereum wallets may require users to pay for gas costs themselves). We plan to adopt better scaling and gas solutions in the future as they emerge. Which Ethereum network is this using? Community Points are currently on the Rinkeby testnet (through summer 2020), and balances, transactions, and memberships may be reset during that period. Afterwards, we will be migrating Community Points to the Ethereum mainnet. Points balances will be carried over (though will need to be reclaimed). Bug Bounty / Whitehat Program To help identify potential bugs, Reddit is inviting security researchers to assist in finding vulnerabilities in Community Points. Interested developers and security researchers should visit https://www.reddit.com/wiki/whitehat.
What about Vote Manipulation and Karma Farming?
Reddit’s site-wide policies strictly prohibit vote manipulation, and we have dedicated teams and technology in place to detect and mitigate things such as spam and abuse. Redditors who attempt to manipulate votes may be temporarily or permanently banned from a community and/or the site. In addition, the community has final say on who earns how many Points. If someone is acting in bad faith, for example spamming the subreddit, the community can vote to strike them from current and future distributions. Like everything on Reddit, this is evolving, so we’ll continue to evaluate and explore alternative ways to stop any abuse.
Creat your Vault now
Create Your Vault on Your Smartphone
Use the mobile app to create a Vault
Get the official Reddit app for iOS or Android
Log in to your Reddit account
Open your Camera, scan the QR code & follow the URL
Or, open the Reddit app and tap your profile photo at the top. Then tap Vault, and follow the instructions
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