At the end of March 2018, we saw Reddit remove the option to pay for their gold membership package in Bitcoin, in a move that surprised many people, ourselves included. As a forum for the underground, it seemed very counter intuitive for Reddit to stop accepting Bitcoin, they already had the infrastructure for it, so why would they want to regress and take a step back from a technology that really, Reddit has helped to spearhead. Reddit decided to drop Bitcoin after some issues with Coinbase and their current payments system. Overall, we could see no indication of when, or indeed if, Bitcoin would be returning to the Reddit platform. This morning we are finally seeing reports of a new cryptocurrency integration for Reddit, which will see the website working alongside Coinbase to start accepting not only Bitcoin payments, but, Ethereum and Litecoin payments too.
.@Reddit, which hosts communities for every single cryptocurrency in the world, is hoping to bring back crypto payments to the platform, this time with Ethereum and Litecoin in addition to Bitcoin, according to CTO @KeyserSosa. pic.twitter.com/wkUniMvhex
— Cheddar (@cheddar) May 2, 2018
In an interview with Cheddar, the chief technology officer at Reddit, Chris Slowe said:
"We have been looking at other cryptocurrencies. As a matter of fact, that was part of the issue with the high fees on the bitcoin network. We are looking at Ethereum and Litecoin that are both provided by Coinbase."
It does look as if Reddit have recognised some inherent advantages of accepting multiple cryptocurrency payments, not only for the cheaper fees associated with Litecoin and Ethereum but moreover, the reduced transaction time in comparison to Bitcoin will lead more Reddit users to pay for gold subscriptions using a Bitcoin alternative. This is great news for Reddit and of course, even better news for Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. This might only be one subscription service, but it offers investors and traders yet another route on which they can spend their cryptocurrency. Moreover, this may of course inspire new people to start buying cryptocurrencies as, the Reddit subscription offers an easy way to spend them. In a world that strives for adoption, the commodifying of such assets is a great way to ensure that cryptocurrencies continue to move around the markets. Hopefully, we see these payments accepted on the Reddit network soon enough.
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