In just three months, Reddit onboarded 2.5 million crypto wallets through its NFT marketplace—all without ever using the word “NFT.”
The online community site has drawn users by hawking “collectible avatars,” which are similar to Reddit’s typical, profile-pic avatars, only that they include unique benefits and are backed by blockchain technology. For example, owners have full license to use the art of their avatar on and off the platform, and owners’ profiles will also feature their tokens in a visible way, a la Twitter’s NFT integration.
Reddit opened its marketplace to select users in July, then released its first publicly available drop soon after—a collection of 40,000 avatars that has since sold out. By mid-October, over two million avatars had been minted, either through purchases or free airdrops to high-contributing users. But the real sign of success has been the number of new wallets, called “Vaults,” that the site has been able to register. While probable that fewer than 2.5 million different users registered the 2.5 million wallets (since one user can register as many wallets as they want), there is no doubt that Reddit has built one of the largest early audiences to engage with its Web3 program.
The collectible avatars are most definitely NFTs, but there’s a simple reason why Reddit chose to call them something more straightforward: “We made the decision to make [the experience] more approachable,” said Neal Hubman, Reddit’s global head of client solutions. “It's really about what it can offer more so than all of the jargon and back-end technology that gets thrown around.”