Redditors have created thousands and thousands of crypto wallets to purchase NFT avatars • TechCrunch

In July, Reddit jumped on the NFT prepare, launching an NFT-based market that permits customers to buy blockchain-based profile photos for a hard and fast charge. Given the overall sentiment round NFTs at the moment, you would possibly assume — like me — that the experiment ended poorly. However the reverse’s the case apparently.

Right now throughout a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt, Reddit chief product officer Pali Bhat revealed that over three million Redditors have used Reddit’s Vault blockchain pockets to create over three million crypto wallets to this point. Most of these — 2.5 million — had been created to buy NFT profile photos on the platform, he mentioned.

Reddit partnered with roughly 30 artists to launch round 40,000 NFT avatar designs a couple of months in the past, which might be bought through the Reddit cell app at costs starting from $9.99 to $99.99. (They’re all offered out in the mean time.) Customers who bought one of many limited-edition pics received licensing rights to apply it to and off of Reddit as an avatar, and will combine and match their avatar’s look utilizing a built-in avatar builder instrument.

Reddit partnered with Polygon, an Ethereum-compatible blockchain, to mint the avatars. (In blockchain jargon, “minting” refers to publishing a novel NFT in order that it may be purchased or offered.) Vault is used to retailer and handle NFTs by the Reddit app.

Reddit’s newest foray into the NFT area comes after the social community started permitting customers to set any NFT as their profile image, following on the heels of Twitter.

Past NFTs, Reddit has branched into various totally different instructions in latest months searching for new traces of income. The corporate has made a number of acquisitions, shopping for content material moderation startup Oterlu, pure language processing firm MeaningCloud, machine studying platform Spell and contextualization firm Spiketrap. Reddit’s additionally launched a brand new developer portal to provide third-party apps and bots a lift, and it’s upgraded its stay audio product, Reddit Discuss, with new discovery options.