Getting upvotes on reddit is no longer just a feel good endeavor but potentially a pretty profitable one if you are on ethtrader.

The home of ethereum’s community where they partied and cried in line with the ups and downs of eth’s price, ethtrader, has now launched tokenized reddit points called donuts.

Why donuts? Well because once upon a time someone asked how much eth is worth, and someone said: no clue, but at least a donut.

Then they discussed what sort of donut, and how much a donut is worth, with this one being an expensive one of $20.

Yes, eth was worth quite a bit less than that once, and then went on to be worth many donuts. Like eth too, the donut is worth very, very little fresh out of the oven, just 0.00000469914 eth per token.

Donut trading token on Uniswap, Dec 2019

This is Uniswap, a decentralized exchange/broker that has the privilege of being the very first to add donuts.

We can see all those transactions trading the token back and forth and we can see it has 1.7 million donuts for which 8.2 eth has been paid.

The Donut smart contract says currently there are 46 million donuts, so we just did the maths to conclude their market cap is currently 216 eth, or $32,000.

Not bad for some s***posting huh. Although there were also some work of art postings for these yummy tokens.

However some revolted against the donuts and went off to create their own sub where some music teacher is top mod. While Carl Larson, the top mod of r/ethtrader, is a coder and built by himself these tokenized reddit votes and integrated it with an Aragon Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).

It’s “a way to help onboard people into the ecosystem” he said, with a registration required before being able to claim.

“Donuts Are No Longer Centralized! Backed by smart contracts developed by mod u/cslarson, your Donuts will soon be ERC-20 tokens that you own and control on the Ethereum blockchain!”

So says the first registration pop-up tab that appears after clicking on the sidebar of the new reddit design.

The next page then asks you to get Metamask or connect to it, with the process then largely idiot proof.

This is of course in many ways the same process one has to go through to use an eth dapp, with the onboarding here potentially going beyond just the basics to the more “advanced” DAO familiarizing.

We haven’t had time to look at the Aragon DAOs from a user’s perspective, for example. Obviously there’s far too much going on in this space, we can’t cover everything, but if there was a mods election through tokenized points on a DAO platform, that would probably take priority over much else presuming people care to participate in it.

That makes this meme-named token far more than a gimmick because it can be a re-alignment of the relationship between platforms and users.

That’s in two main parts. First, as this content is created by users, that they should have some share of the revenue is somewhat common sense.

That share in this case is for the banner space at the top of r/ethtrader. You can buy it for just 300,000 donuts currently, worth 1.4 eth, $200.

You could be out-bidded, however, so you might not keep it for long, but this cost goes to the donuts receivers, the ethtraders, and it is from this that donut’s value comes primarily.

There are also plans to have extras of sorts, like cool emjois and likewise little gimicks, with potentially 5,000 burned donuts buying you a 30 days membership.

They apparently have re-aligned donut weighing for polls voting. The idea is obviously that to counter fake accounts, we have these donuts which give different weights to a vote based on the amount of contribution.

If you can just buy these donuts, then the above is canceled. So it appears the plan now is to somehow differentiate between earned donuts and bought donuts, with only the former counting.

That’s extremely important when it comes to mod elections. Reddit is in some ways despised by many because if you somehow get top mod, you can turn r/politics into r/childporn whatever you want.

That first occurred in this space with r/bitcoin where the top mod, who probably was directly or indirectly in the pocket of Blockstream, threw away his free speech to the sound of a million bans or more.

The outrage of this dictatorial set-up is still felt very keenly by many. That turns the heat on Conde Nast, which owns reddit, and obviously if it reaches a certain level they would probably have to start thinking of appearing in front of Congress which you can be sure they wouldn’t want.

As the far bigger Facebook platform took all the heat, they were let off scot free, but plenty still are very angry at this dictatorship where one man or woman orders around with no accountability just because they happened to get top mod.

So from reddit’s perspective you’d perhaps think they’re desperate to democratize it so that they have such democracy as a shield from any blame. And how best to atempt this democratization than this entire donuts experiment?

Making this all potentially very impactful and at a mainstream level as the Aaron Schwartz platform starts perhaps thinking of redeeming itself to keep up with potential challengers who can take their audience away as easily and as quickly as the music teacher piped those of ethtrader.

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