Two weeks ago, Reddit and the Ethereum Foundation issued a challenge called The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off to the Ethereum developer community: Propose a fully decentralized scaling solution that will enable a low-cost, fast, and smooth distribution of Reddit’s blockchain-based Community Points across its entire network. Those points are rewards for posting interesting content, and they take the form of ERC-20 tokens. The vision is that every Reddit community (subreddit) will create their own customized Points and decide how they will be used. So, there’s an incredible opportunity for the competition to result in a wide range of applications offering a broad spectrum of benefits.

Reddit and Ethereum will choose the winning solution, but neither organization will award a prize for it, even though the selected technology will likely enable the rollout of crypto-based points to Reddit’s 430 million monthly users. That decision has attracted some criticism from Redditors. So, to help stimulate engagement and incentivize great proposals, the Maker Foundation has decided to offer a 25,000 Dai bounty to the victorious developer (or dev team). 

Dai-ing to Scale: When Ethereum Wins, DeFi Wins 

Why are we offering the prize? The Maker Foundation recognizes that the competition presents a huge opportunity to spur mainstream crypto adoption. MakerDAO and the entire DeFi ecosystem have benefited greatly from the collective work of the amazing Ethereum developer community, and this is a way of giving something back. What’s more, the Maker community has big plans for Dai. DeFi’s most popular decentralized stablecoin will scale massively in the coming years with the help of the strong and growing MakerDAO community, and helping to power the growth of Ethereum is a critical part of making that happen.

Does the winning solution chosen by Reddit/Ethereum have to integrate Dai or the Maker Protocol to earn the 25,000 Dai bounty? Absolutely not. DeFi is all about the benefits of building on open systems, and the goal of scaling Ethereum is too important to hold a tribal attitude.

Dai Bounty Eligibility and Delivery

Since the contest is run by Reddit and the Ethereum Foundation, all you need to do to be eligible for the 25,000 Dai prize is submit your proposal as per The Great Reddit Scaling Bake Off announcement: Share the details of your solution in the comments before the competition deadline of July 31, 2020. 

Once the winner is announced on Reddit, the Maker Foundation will reach out to that person or persons to arrange payment of the award. 

About Reddit’s Community Points

Reddit is one the internet’s most popular community hubs. Known as the “Front Page of the Internet,” Reddit hosts a broad range of content and is home to some of the largest and most active crypto communities. 

Community Points as tokens are currently being trialed by two subreddits—r/fortniteBR (Fortnite Battle Royale) and r/cryptocurrency. Combined, those groups have a membership of over 2 million users. Points are distributed monthly as rewards, and Reddit Karma is used as a basis for allocation. The r/fortniteBR subreddit Community Points are called BRICKS, while r/cryptocurrency Points are called MOONS. Both are used to display reputation, unlock features (e.g., badges and GIFs), add weight to votes in polls, and more within the subreddit.

The Point tokens are stored in a “Vault” on Reddit’s smartphone app, and, like a regular Ethereum wallet, are accessed using a private key held by the owner alone. Tokens can be transferred to other Reddit users or Ethereum addresses. Community Points are currently on the Rinkeby testnet (through summer 2020). Additionally, as noted on Reddit’s Vault page, balances, transactions, and memberships may be reset during that period. After that, Reddit intends to migrate Points balances over to the Ethereum mainnet, though they will need to be reclaimed.

25,000 Reasons to Get Involved

Reddit’s Ethereum scaling competition is worthy of the attention of the best minds in the blockchain space. We hope our bounty incentivizes those who have been working on a solution that could benefit hundreds of millions of Redditors, but have been on the fence about submitting ideas.

Learn more about MakerDAO and the Dai stablecoin today, and review MakerDAO’s developer guides and tutorials, just in case you need them.