CA deploying soon

Six years.One very bad decision.

Reddit built a way to pay its users, proved it worked, switched it off, and then sold the company on the back of the posts. Every claim below is dated and sourced.

8.8Moons per karma
6.9Mmembers in r/CryptoCurrency
85%$MOON drop on the news
~40MMoons Reddit burned
$6.4BReddit IPO valuation
216,306$MOON holders today

The timeline

How it actually happened.

Scores are the joke. The dates, numbers and links are not.

8.8k
u/reddit·14 May 2020
Reddit launches Community Points, an Ethereum-based reward system announced in posts on r/CryptoCurrency and r/FortNiteBR. The two subreddits get tokens called Moons and Bricks. They are ERC-20 tokens, held in a wallet built into the Reddit mobile app called the Vault, and distributed monthly based on how much your posts and comments were upvoted.
CoinDesk, 14 May 2020 Kraken explainer
217k
u/reddit·June 2020
The first distribution goes out at 8.8 Moons per karma. For the first time, an internet point has a market price attached to it. The subreddit it launched in has 6.9 million members. Every other community on Reddit gets nothing.
-4.7M
u/reddit·the migrations
Moons move off Ethereum mainnet to keep fees survivable, first to a testnet and then to Arbitrum Nova. In the bridge deprecation along the way, 4.7 million Moons are effectively burned. Holders were not asked.
2.0k
u/cryptocomu/kraken·July and August 2023
Crypto.com lists $MOON on 18 July. Kraken follows on 7 August, adding both spot trading and perpetual futures for $MOON and BRICK. The tokens jump around 50% on the Kraken news, and $MOON is up roughly 280% across that month. Karma is now trading on regulated exchanges with an orderbook. By any fair reading, the experiment worked.
CoinDesk, 8 Aug 2023 CryptoSlate
-217k
u/reddit·17 October 2023, 13:02 EST Most downvoted
Ten weeks after the Kraken listing, Reddit announces it is ending Community Points, citing scale and an evolving regulatory picture. $MOON falls more than 85%, to roughly two cents. The program is switched off on 8 November 2023. Reddit renounces the Moons contract and burns its own holding of about 40 million Moons on the way out.
Forkast analysis CoinGeek
-3
u/three_mods·the hour before Receipts
Moderators were told one hour before the public announcement. On-chain analysts at Lookonchain traced 456,353 $MOON, worth around $92,000, sold roughly thirty minutes ahead of the news, and a further 363,227 $MOON two minutes before it landed. r/CryptoCurrency confirmed to CoinDesk that every moderator who sold ahead of the announcement was removed from the team. The story was picked up by CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, CryptoSlate and Protos, and written up by the law firm Holland & Knight in its insider-trading coverage.
CoinDesk, 23 Oct 2023 Cointelegraph CryptoSlate Protos Holland & Knight
-6.5B
u/reddit·21 March 2024
Five months after switching off the only mechanism that ever paid users, Reddit goes public. The IPO prices at $34 a share, the top of its range, valuing the company at roughly $6.4 billion. The stock opens at $47 and touches $57.80 on day one. It is the first major social media listing since Pinterest in 2019.
CNBC Variety
-203M
u/the_s1·the filing itself
Reddit's own S-1 discloses $203 million in data licensing arrangements over terms of two to three years, with a minimum of $66.4 million to be recognised in 2024 alone. The best known of these is the Google agreement, reported at around $60 million a year, to train AI models on Reddit posts. The posts were written for free. The licensing revenue was not shared with the people who wrote them.
Reddit S-1, SEC EDGAR
40k
u/ccmoon_dao·March to November 2024 Respect
The community does not let it die. Moons are bridged to Arbitrum One in March 2024. In June, moderators restart distributions themselves and form the CCMOON DAO, making Moons an independent project with no Reddit involvement at all. In November they partner with Unstoppable Domains to launch .$MOON domains. The platform quit. The community did not.
CCMoons project timeline
216k
u/onchain·29 August 2026
Three years after Reddit walked away, $MOON still has 216,306 holders on Arbitrum Nova and still trades. You do not have to take our word for it, the contract is public and the holder list is readable by anyone.
$MOON contract on Arbitrum Nova
new
u/upvote·today OP
This is our way of giving it back. Hold UPVOTE and you get paid in RDDT, the official tokenized Reddit share, on Robinhood Chain. They turned your karma into shares and kept every one. This hands them back.

Why this exists

The experiment was never the problem.

The usual story about Community Points is that it failed. It did not. It ran for three and a half years, it put a real price on internet points, it got listed on two major exchanges within a single month, and it worked well enough that a community of nearly seven million people organised their behaviour around it.

What failed was Reddit's appetite for it. The program was switched off ten weeks after Kraken listed it, and five months before an IPO that valued the company at $6.4 billion on the strength of the same user-generated content the points were meant to reward.

That is the whole grievance, and it does not require exaggeration. A company built a way to pay its contributors, proved it worked, ended it, and then sold the output of those contributors to the public markets and to AI companies for hundreds of millions.

Sources

Check every line.

Nothing on this page is invented. Where a number is contested or approximate, it is written as approximate.

The launch

The listings

The shutdown

The moderators

The IPO

On chain, verifiable

UPVOTE is not affiliated with Reddit, Inc., r/CryptoCurrency, the CCMOON DAO, Kraken, Crypto.com or Robinhood Markets, Inc. Every outlet above is cited as a source, not as an endorsement. Holder counts were read directly from the $MOON contract on 29 August 2026 and will drift as people trade.