Gate.io AMA with r/CryptoCurrency-The Leading Community for Cryptocurrency News, Discussion and Analysis.

Time: Oct 15th, 2022, 13:00 UTC
Gate.io hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with the Representative of r/CryptoCurrency, John Murphy in the [Gate.io Exchange Community]Reddit Website: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CCMOD_
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Q&A from Gate.io

Q1: Could you first give us a brief introduction about yourself?

John: Sure. By training I am a Materials Scientist/Engineer. I completed my undergraduate studies at Drexel Univ, and then did my PhD in semiconductor processing and characterization at UT-Dallas. After that I spent six years at Lawrence Livermore National Lab working on semiconductor-based radiation detectors and nuclear batteries.
But, my real love is cryptocurrency. I got started in crypto mining Dogecoin right after it launched in late 2013, and really fell down the rabbit hole of GPU mining. I got involved with Monero very early on, and joined the moderation team of r/Cryptocurrency in 2016 to help with some bot functionality. In 2018 I actually launched a cryptocurrency that is still alive and well today - Wownero. And now I am working full time on my own company in space.

Q2: How has the community grown at r/CryptoCurrency over the years?

John: It has really grown with cryptocurrency as a whole. When I joined r/CryptoCurrency in early 2014 there were maybe 5-10k subscribers, and now we are over 5.5 million.
Our growth coincides with market cycles, and tends to go parabolic with the price of Bitcoin. I think in 2017/8 we went from 100k subs to over 500k, and then we kinda grew slowly to become over 1M in early 2020, but in the last two years of this market cycle we have now gone over 5M.

One interesting note from this last round of growth is that r/CryptoCurrency became a bigger and more active subreddit than r/Bitcoin. So, we are now the largest crypto community on Reddit and perhaps the largest and most active single community interested in cryptocurrency on the internet!

Q3: What exactly are Reddit Community Points and Reddit MOONs in particular?

John: So, Reddit Community Points (RCPs) were introduced by Reddit officially in June of 2020 in two subreddits: r/CryptoCurrency with MOONs as the reddit community point token and in r/FortniteBR with BRICKs as their token.
There is a bit more history because an ETH trading subreddit r/ETHtrader had launched DONUTs, as kind of a prototype version of RCPs, and I think Reddit used them as a model and even helped the moderators of that sub with their DONUT experiment, but they were not officially created or distributed by Reddit.
RCPs are tokens that are distributed by Reddit once every four weeks to users based on their contributions (how many upvotes they got basically) to a subreddit. These tokens are designed to be used to vote in governance polls for how the subreddit is operated (and can also be used to purchase special membership and reddit awards). So, really RCPs are essentially governance tokens for a DAO-like operation of a subreddit.
They were launched on Rinkeby testnet in June 2020, and about a year later they migrated to Reddit’s own private Arbitrum network that ran on Rinkeby testnet, and now about two months ago they migrated to “mainnet” on Arbitrum Nova.

Q4: What network are Reddit MOONs on? How is Arbitrum Nova built for Social-fi and Game-fi?

John: So as I mentioned MOONs now run on Arbitrum Nova, which is a new network from Off Chain Labs. They are the same company that launched Arbitrum One network - one of the most popular layer 2s on Ethereum.
Arbitrum One uses optimistic roll-up technology to provide users with lower transaction fees for interacting with Defi, NFTs, etc.
With Arbitrum Nova they have partnered with some big companies like Reddit to create a data availability committee. This allows the transaction fees to be even much cheaper than they are on Arbitrum One, which is why they say it is targeted for Game-fi and Social-fi where users will likely have many small transactions.
You can see their list of partners here: https://nova.arbitrum.io/. It includes Reddit, Consensys, Google Cloud, and others.

Q5: How do you see Social-fi progressing in the future?

John: It is an interesting question that I think it is actually very hard to predict how it will play out.
Personally I think that in the near future we will see other large existing communities try to increase user engagement and sense of ownership by issuing a token, similar to what Reddit has done with MOONs and BRICKs (and more RCPs coming soon?). r/CryptoCurrency is probably the largest DAO in existence with nearly 200k holders of M O O N token qualifying as members. I just think it is much easier to drop a token into a large existing community than it is to build a community around a token.
In the longer term, it is very difficult to say, but I think it will continue to grow, and there will be many interesting experiments, but I do think it will continue to primarily be used to add value to an existing community, and attempts to build a community around a token will be less successful (it seems like right now there are many DAOs without a real purpose out there)

Q6: Will exchanges like Gate.io implement social features into their exchange token functionality?

John: Personally I think that is something exchanges could really engage users with. Almost all exchanges have their own token now which allows for reduction in trading fees or some other perk, but what if those tokens came with real governance powers. Obviously this may have some regulatory issues, but I think at some point someone will try it out. If token holders could really vote to direct business on the exchange, such as token listings, or voting on fee rates, etc.
This is also a question I thought maybe gate.io would have some insight on too.