Ah, Reddit. Such a fantastic website. A place to learn things from other members, view hilarious GIFs, and for the bitcoin enthusiast, a community active enough to keep you reading for days.
And they’ve announced today that they’ve received a whopping $50 million in funding from Sam Alton, along with Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.
So what’s this got to do with bitcoin/cryptocurrency?
Well, they’re planning to give ten percent back to the Reddit community. Seriously. And one of the ways they are considering doing that is with cryptocurrency.
Here’s what Reddit CEO Yishan Wong has to say on the matter:
CAVEAT: KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS PLAN COULD TOTALLY FAIL
We are thinking about creating a cryptocurrency and making it exchangeable (backed) by those shares of reddit, and then distributing the currency to the community. The investors have explicitly agreed to this in their investment terms.
Nothing like this has ever been done before. Basically we have to nail down how to do each step correctly (it is technically, legally, and financially complex), though in our brief consultation with an ex-SEC lawyer, he stated he could find nothing illegal about this plan. Nevertheless, there are something like 30 different things we have to pull off to make this work, so we’re going to try.
(Also, I know this totally contradicts what I said over here but that was before Sam proposed this plan to me, and the idea of being able to distribute ownership of reddit back to the community – a long-held dream of many of us, frankly – is important enough to try and do this)
Again, we want to emphasize that this plan is in its earliest stages right now and could totally fail (if it does, we will find another way to get the shares to the community somehow), but we are going to try it because… well, because we are reddit and we do these kinds of things.
As for the rest of the funding, that will be used to getting more staff members on board and to further continue growing the website, which ranks as the web’s 49th most popular website, according to Alexa.
There’s not a whole lot more to say on the cryptocurrency front. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.