NFT Avatar Popularity Makes Reddit Vault Use Skyrocket

by James · October 25, 2022

When Reddit created its NFT marketplace last July, it announced customizable avatars that would be available for purchase.

The social news aggregation and content rating site called them “blockchain-backed collectible avatars,” and they were made available on the r/CollectibleAvatars subreddit. Created by independent artists who would receive a share of the profits, the avatars quickly became popular.

The social network initially released 90 designs and gave users who purchased them licensing rights to use the avatars on and off Reddit.

It wasn’t Reddit’s first flirtation with NFTs. In January, the company tried out an innovation that allowed users to set any Ethereum-based NFT as a profile picture. This was shortly after Twitter had launched a similar feature.

Reddit had teamed up with Polygon, a blockchain compatible with Ethereum, to create the avatars. Users will be required to store and manage these in the Reddit Vault, a digital wallet equivalent to a public blockchain address.

“In the future, we see blockchain as a way to bring more empowerment and independence to communities on Reddit,” the company wrote in a statement in July. “Reddit has always been a model of what decentralization can look like online; our communities are self-built and self-powered, and as part of our mission to better empower our communities, we’re exploring tools to help them become even more self-sustaining and self-governing.”

Since the Reddit NFT Marketplace launched in July, the number of users of Reddit Vault Wallets has grown at a remarkable pace. Before the new avatars were made available, around half a million wallets had been opened.

In October, the figure was three million. So around 2.5 million wallets were snapped up in the marketplace’s first three months of availability.

Reddit is estimated to have 50 million daily active users, and the company says it raised more than $350 million last year. The enthusiasm for avatar NFTs and the fact that they are already making money looks set to increase revenue for 2022.

“There has been a lot of positive feedback on how the Reddit airdrop is going. And I noticed that a lot of people are confused about how to go about it. It works perfectly and smoothly,” writes the user @hav3rs on Twitter. The post has a number of follow-ups that explain the process of setting up the NFT avatars.