Reddit Moons (MOON) are blockchain-based tokens that Reddit distributed to members of the r/CryptoCurrency forum as "community points", a reward for posts and comments that other users upvoted. Introduced in May 2020, Moons could be tipped to other users, spent on special memberships, and used to give extra weight in community polls. They were issued as ERC-20 tokens and later lived on Arbitrum Nova, a low-cost network built on Ethereum.
Moons were one of the largest experiments in giving social-media users a token tied to their contributions. Reddit said the points were not meant to have monetary value, but they traded on exchanges and acquired a market price. On 17 October 2023 Reddit announced it would end the Community Points programme, and it closed in November 2023; the tokens continued to exist on-chain afterwards.
Reddit Moons in plain terms
Imagine a neighbourhood club that hands out reward stamps to members whose ideas the others like. The stamps can be swapped between members, used to buy a fancy badge, or counted as extra votes when the club decides things. Members can also take their stamps home in their own wallet rather than leaving them in the club's drawer.
Reddit Moons were those stamps, recorded on a public blockchain. Because they sat in members' own wallets, people started selling them to outsiders, and the stamps gained a price. When the club stopped handing out new stamps, the existing ones stayed in people's wallets, but much of their purpose disappeared.
How Moons worked
Reddit launched community points in May 2020 for two forums: Moons on r/CryptoCurrency and Bricks on r/FortNiteBR. The tokens first ran on an Ethereum test network. In August 2022 Reddit moved them to Arbitrum Nova, a layer-2 chain within the Arbitrum ecosystem designed for cheap, high-volume transactions, which made transfers practical for ordinary users.
Each month, new Moons were distributed according to "karma", the score Reddit users earn from upvotes. Users held them in Reddit's built-in Vault, a self-custodial crypto wallet tied to their account, or moved them to another wallet address. Uses included:
- Tipping. Users could send Moons to the authors of posts they valued.
- Special membership. Holders could pay Moons for features such as custom emojis and animated images in comments.
- Governance. Polls in the forum could weight votes by Moon holdings, a simple form of token governance.
- Burning. Moons spent on memberships were burned, removing them from supply.
Moons traded on decentralised exchanges, giving the token's supply rules and karma distribution a real market effect. Because rewards depended on upvotes, critics argued the system encouraged farming karma with low-effort or promotional posts, a form of shilling.
End of the programme
Reddit announced on 17 October 2023 that it was sunsetting Community Points, including special memberships, with the programme ending on 8 November 2023. The company said it did not see a way to scale the programme across the site. The market price of MOON fell sharply after the announcement. Reports that some forum moderators had sold large amounts of Moons shortly before the news drew criticism within the community.
In November 2023 Reddit renounced control of the MOON contract, and a share of the supply held for future distributions was burned, reported at roughly 30% of the total. After that, no new Moons were issued by Reddit, and the token continued to exist and trade on Arbitrum Nova under community control rather than as a Reddit product.
Significance and lessons
Moons are often cited as an example of both the promise and limits of tokenised social rewards:
- User ownership. Contributors held a transferable asset in their own wallets, a core idea of Web3.
- Scaling costs. Running the programme on Ethereum's main chain was impractical; it needed a cheaper network to work at all.
- Value and incentives. Once points traded for money, the incentive to game the reward system grew, and their price became a focus of "to the moon" speculation.
- Regulatory uncertainty. Tokens that reward activity and can be sold raise questions about whether they are virtual currency, loyalty points or investment products, an area where rules such as the Howey Test are often discussed.
- Platform dependence. Holders kept their tokens, but most of the uses were features inside Reddit that vanished when the company ended the programme.
Comparable models include airdrops that reward early users, utility tokens tied to platform features, and loyalty schemes that stop short of putting points on a blockchain.