Reddit Co-Founder Is Set To Invest $100 Million in Social Media on Solana Blockchain

In an announcement today, Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder, said he’s set to invest millions of dollars in building out a form of decentralized social media using the Solana blockchain.

During a fireside chat with Solana co-founder Raj Gokal first reported by The Block, Alexis Ohanian stated that “One of the reasons why I’m here is to announce — I have a venture fund called 776 — we’re earmarking $50 million to invest in the next wave of social, built on Solana.”

In the course of the chat, the Reddit co-founder pointed out that the plan is to increase the fund to $100 million since the $50 million initially allocated wasn’t enough for the investment.

This is coming in just a day after Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX CEO stated that building social media on the blockchain could be absolutely huge.

During the discussion, Bankman-Fried claimed that decentralized social media could solve a lot of pain points. He pointed to pre-existing social media sites, which have massive userbases, and stated that integrations with these sites could help to scale decentralized finance (DeFi) to millions of more users.

Reddit to Convert Karma Points to ERC-20 Tokens

In another development, the popular internet forum, Reddit, is also planning to start converting users’ karma points into ERC-20 tokens, with the hope of attracting 500 million crypto users worldwide.

In a series of tweets on 3rd November, Reddit engineer, Rahul, highlighted the efforts of the platform to improve the interaction of users through various crypto initiatives:

“How will we pull this off? Reddit has partnered with @OffchainLabs (@arbitrum) and created our own separate instance. Community points for 2 subreddits (~80,000 users) are already on Rinkeby Testnet on our Arbitrum network (separate to Arbitrum One).”

Previously, Reddit has already used the Arbitrum solution to scale the community token system, but now Reddit is planning to transfer karma points into tokens. According to the website:

“Your Community Points exist on the blockchain, independently of Reddit, where they can only be controlled by you (just like Bitcoin (BTC) !).”

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Solomon Odunayo

Solomon is a trader, crypto enthusiast, and analyst with over four years of experience in the industry. He strongly believes that crypto assets and the blockchain will continue to gain prominence. At TimesTabloid.com, he focuses on news, articles with deep analysis of blockchain projects, and technical analysis of crypto trading pairs.