So, long story short, Reddit has discontinued its beta for community reward points, ending operation and integration of Moons on r/CryptoCurrency. Although mods are looking to continue the project, the news has caused a collapse in price, and promises a long, up-hill battle for the project leads to resuscitate the coin by providing new value and utility.

For those of you lucky enough to know little or nothing about Reddit.com, it is a social media platform which promotes itself as the front page of the internet. Composed of many subreddits which focus on specific community interests, it is a well trafficked site with wide, if notorious, recognition.

As part of their interest in Web3, Reddit devs entered the world of NFTs and crypto circa 2020, setting out a plan that could potentially replace their system of karma with a blockchain holding real value.

Thus were born Moons.

Moons are a type of digital token that exist on the Ethereum blockchain and are associated with the subreddit r/CryptoCurrency on Reddit. Introduced in 2020, Moons were created as a way to reward and incentivize active participation within the subreddit. More often than not, it fed into so-called moonfarming where low-effort posts were made to farm Moons.

The distribution of Moons is based on a user's contributions, including factors such as posting, commenting, and receiving upvotes on their content. The more a user contributes to the subreddit and receives engagement from the community, the more Moons they can earn.

Moons are designed to be used within the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit ecosystem. Users can use Moons to tip other users for their valuable contributions or engaging content. Additionally, Moons can be used to purchase special memberships, which provide certain perks and features within the subreddit.

It's important to note that Moons are specific to the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit and do not have any inherent value outside of that community. That is until Reddit changed their TOS, explicitly taking away the clause that stipulated their zero-value. Though they could not originally be freely traded on cryptocurrency exchanges like other mainstream cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, after this clause was removed they were quickly adopted. Active trading on Kracken saw prices for Moons reaching fifty cents or more.

Overall, Moons represent a unique use case of cryptocurrency within a specific online community, where they serve as a means of rewarding and encouraging active participation. This would have presented the largest, most public adoption of post2earn Web3 integration, and been an interesting case study for adoption.

However, this seems to be another disaster.

Reddit cited issues of scalability in their decision to cancel the beta. It was suggested that the Moons blockchain could not be properly or effectively adopted across the site, though this is openly doubted by most people in the community, or those with a slight understanding of the technology. Instead, it has been suggested that Reddit canceled their beta because it was rewarding users without generating money for Reddit, itself. This claim is somewhat backed by their new proposed system of Gold, which sees half of all Gold purchases going to reward Reddit.

Suffice to say, members of the community are a bit upset. Some speculators have spent tens of thousands acquiring Moons, while community members have earned 1,000s for their posts, comments, and engagement. For some, this represented a substantial, even life changing, amount of money, which has become largely worthless.

As stated, there is hope that Moons can continue in some fashion, backed by the strong and fanatical devotion of the community, but this remains to be seen. Generally, when things of this nature happen, it leads to a slow, inevitable demise.

But many are expressing their anger, especially as news, rumor, and investigation suggest that some individuals were able to make convenient trades before the announcement. Is this securities fraud? A rugpull? Plain, simple theft? It is not for me to say, but others are saying it.

Only time will tell.