Ethereum Community Chasing a “Mirage in the Desert” With Reddit News

As the Ethereum network yields a lot of good news lately, the ETH community was excited after the reports about Reddit presumably experimenting with a blockchain-powered token points system, with Ethereum being central to the development.

Redditor MagoCrypto was the first to post the news, as he uploaded a video disclosing a beta implementation of the system. This was later partly confirmed by a Reddit representative when reached out to by the media.

However, while some Ethereum enthusiasts are pleased with the news, the celebration might be a little overblown and disproportionate.

Ryan Sean Adams, a well-known Ethereum proponent and crypto investor, stated on Twitter that ETH adoption may rise to new heights after the aforementioned implementation. However, this may not be as simple as it sounds.

Adams noted that the exposure of 430 million Redditors to Ethereum would be massive. This is an agreeable prediction, but the author of the “Bankless” newsletter does not comprehend the rate of growth.

Out of 430 million Redditors, only a very small fraction shows interest in digital assets. Even though it will be a significant number, adoption rates on social media websites are generally slow and need a lot of time.

DeFi challenge and Ethereum’s PoS transition

Next, Adams believes that the community tokens being ERC20 would be a strong benefit for DeFi since it sould be compatible. However, it would have been hugely beneficial if DeFi was at least 10 years old, like digital assets themselves. The knowledge of DeFi is limited to only a bunch of people within the crypto industry itself, let alone Redditors, thus it is incorrect to state that DeFi will gain popularity within the next few months.

DeFi still suffers from major issues concerning interoperability and liquidity, all of which have to be resolved before it could possibly enter the mainstream market or attract traditional users.

With an imminent PoS transition, Ethereum has its own issues as well, especially with respect to network backlogs and scalability. Wallet initialization is one of the major issues associated with Ethereum because if contract creation transaction is stuck in between and users begin to send other transactions at the same time, it will be impossible for the Ethereum network to initiate appropriate contract events.

A possible influx of new users may exacerbate the issue, and this is something to be resolved before any kind of huge network activity.

Getting ahead of themselves?

This is a very important question since despite statements from Reddit hinting at the “experiment”, there were no official hints or confirmations as to the Ethereum being involved in any shape or form.

This way, one can state that elation within the Ethereum community is premature. Will this be one more failed narrative? Only time will tell.