Thanks to its collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that can be used as avatars, the social network Reddit claims to have attracted 3 million users new to Web3. That’s more unique wallets than the OpenSea platform itself. Are these statistics verified and if so, how is this possible? We’ll explain it all to you.
Reddit has more portfolios than OpenSea
The community platform Reddit, which had already been offering to create its own avatar for two years, launched last July the possibility to buy its profile image in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT). Given the general market sentiment at the time, few people envisaged the success of this implementation.
Yet Pali Bhat, one of Reddit’s top executives, revealed that over 3 million users have created a Vault digital wallet through the social network. The majority of them, 2.5 million, would have done so to get an avatar and use it as their profile picture.
To put this information into context, the NFTs marketplace OpenSea has approximately 2.3 million users. The main competitor on Solana (SOL), Magic Eden, has 1.17 million, while LooksRare has just over 100,000, according to Dune Analytics data.
In other words, if Pali Bhat’s revelations are true, Reddit would currently hold more portfolios of NFTs than the industry’s leading marketplace, namely OpenSea. For the record, Reddit has about 52 million daily users and nearly 430 million people log in at least once a month.
How did Reddit pull off this stunt
To get started, Reddit partnered with about 30 artists to build a collection of 44,000 NFTs representing unique avatars. Now all sold, these were available for purchase for between €10 and €100 directly on the mobile app.
Specifically, the collection is based on Polygon (MATIC), one of Ethereum’s (ETH) main second-layer solutions. Reddit has taken care of all user transaction fees, making the mint process as smooth as possible.
Reddit’s real trick was not to mention the terms NFT, cryptocurrency or blockchain at any point. To get their avatars, users simply had to create a “Reddit Vault” (i.e. a digital wallet), register the 12-word security phrase and they were done.
However, with these 44,000 NFTs, we are far from the 3 million wallets announced. Indeed, Reddit did not stop there. Given the significant success of its first collection, the platform decided to carry out an airdrop of 4 collections, each containing at least 300,000 NFTs.
According to Dune Analytics, the first collection of 44,593 NFTs has exactly 16,917 unique holders. The 4 new collections have a total of 2,650,717 NFTs and 2,642,162 unique holders.
Reddit, a vector of democratization of the Web3
Since the revelation of this information by Pali Bhat, many people have been praising Reddit’s work in democratising Web3 among the general public. Indeed, the platform has managed to introduce millions of people to blockchain technology by removing the technical barriers that can hold back the majority of novices.
However, let’s not jump to conclusions. Of these 3 million new NFT holders, how many are aware that they are? According to Dunes Analytics, it seems that only 15,000 addresses are actually active and performing other interactions on the blockchain.
In other words, the majority of Reddit’s NFT holders are unaware of the technology their avatar is based on. In the end, this makes sense, as the social network’s strategy was to remove any mention of blockchain in order to attract as many novices as possible.
From now on, the challenge for Reddit is to succeed in educating and informing its users little by little on the notions of blockchain, digital wallets, network fees, etc. With nearly 3 million users now having a foot in Web3, Reddit has a real responsibility to help them take the plunge for good.
