Reddit’s Cryptocurrency Could Have Many Uses – Forbes

Reddit is considering creating a cryptocurrency backed by shares of the company. These shares would then be redistributed back to the community in recognition of the role it has played in the sites success.

Or that at least is the plan for some of the $50 million the company raised in funding from a group of investors that include Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.

Other investors participating in the round, according to CEO Yishan Wongs blog post on the subject, include Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, Jared Leto, Jessica Livingston, Kevin and Julia Hartz, Mariam Naficy, Josh Kushner, Snoop Dogg, and Yishan Wong.

The capital will be applied to a number of projects, Wong wrotethe company plans to hire more staff for product development, expand the community management team, build better moderation and community tools, work more closely with third party developers to expand its mobile offerings, improve the self-serve ad product, build out Redditgifts marketplace and invest in the infrastructure.

The investors also pledged to give back 10 percent of their shares to the community. In the comments section, Wong went into more detail about how that could occur.

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 were going to try.

Wong freely acknowledges the plan could fail and if it does, its back to the drawing board for a plan to reward the community.

But it is unlikely Reddit would junk the entire project without salvaging something from it.

Last month Daily Dot noted that Reddit was seeking a cryptocurrency engineersomeone with a background in math or computer science to explore new technology applications and infrastructure involving the blockchain and cryptocurrency.

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Reddit's Cryptocurrency Could Have Many Uses - Forbes