Reddit-Based MOON Plunges 85% Amid Plans to Phase Out Community Points

Reddit community tokens, including MOON, DONUT, and BRICK, have shed a significant percentage of their values following news of Community Points cancellation. 

According to Santiment, the three tokens have begun trending as discussions about their future fill Reddit. As reported by TechCrunch, Reddit is set to discontinue its blockchain-based Community Points program, with plans to replace it with its own rewards program.

? #Reddit's community is expressing disdain toward its CEO #Spez & the choice to sunset community points toward $MOON, $BRICK, $DONUT, & others commonly earned through insight contributions and peer tipping. #Moon plummeted as much as -89.9% in ~3 hours. https://t.co/8gvFpBEc6H pic.twitter.com/vr1Sl8VyjG

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) October 17, 2023

The news has dragged MOON down by 85.7% to $0.03342. DONUT and BRICK are down 56.22% and 46.95% respectively.

Turmoil in the Reddit Community

Reddit users are calling out CEO Steve Hoffman (username: spez) for the erratic decision. Community Points had formed an integral part of the Reddit ecosystem, serving as an incentivizing model to drive user engagement.

With the plans to fade off the reward program this November, users will no longer earn points in their Reddit vault. 

This development will impact the underlying utility of MOON, whose intrinsic value is tied to the Community Points system. 

As shown by Santiment, the conversations surrounding this event have fueled an increase in the social volume of the tokens.

The social volume indicator helps measure the number of times a word or phrase appears on a platform. The data analytics platform pegs the Reddit-linked total social volume at 76,113.

Of this number, MOON appears 3415, up 4.49%, DONUT was mentioned 1916 times or 2.39%, while BRICK appeared 204 times or 0.27% of the total.

Despite the uproar, Reddit has not teased any plans to backtrack the plans, drawing on its reasons for taking the position in the first place. These reasons center around the inability to scale the offering across its ecosystem and regulatory concerns.

The Reddit Move: Potential Consequence

Reddit is one of the mainstream social media outfits to go all out on crypto. Its embrace of crypto was highly welcome, with an impressive record of parabolic gains in MOON and BRICK over the past year.

While this move to wean support for Community Points is reversing these gains, other crypto innovations backed by Reddit, such as Non-Fungible Token (NFT), might also take a beating moving forward.

The disclosure from Reddit comes a few months after the social platform subtly reviewed its terms to lift the prohibition on trades involving blockchain-based points. As reported by The Crypto Basic in July, MOON rallied 300% while BRICK surged 533% upon this development.