Reddit has announced a $50 million round of fundraising, as expected. But there's an interesting quirk in the news for average Redditors — it could also be working a cryptocurrency that would be backed by shares in the company.

Yishan Wong, CEO of Reddit, announced in a blog post that Reddit community members could soon have the opportunity to buy some shares in the company.

The fundraising round was led by Sam Altman, president of startup incubator Y Combinator, which helped start Reddit.

"Led by Sam [Altman], the investors in this round have proposed to give 10% of their shares back to the community, in recognition of the central role the community plays in reddit's ongoing success," Wong wrote. "We're going to need to figure out a bunch of details to make it work, but we're hopeful. We'll have more specifics to share about it soon, but in the meantime we wanted to mention it here."

Reddit has not announced details of the funding round, so it is unknown how much of the entire company will be made available to Redditors. If the round sold off 20% of the company, a tenth of that would mean community members would have access to 2% of Reddit's shares. It was also not revealed if these shares would hold any voting power.

Wong added to a comment on his blog post detailing how the company is considering creating its own cryptocurrency that would be backed by Reddit shares.

"CAVEAT: KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS PLAN COULD TOTALLY FAIL," Wong wrote. "We are thinking about creating a cryptocurrency and making it exchangeable (backed) by those shares of reddit, and then distributing the currency to the community. The investors have explicitly agreed to this in their investment terms."

Wong added that there are no shortage of specifics that need to be nailed down before a Reddit cryptocurrency is actually released.

"Nothing like this has ever been done before. Basically we have to nail down how to do each step correctly (it is technically, legally, and financially complex), though in our brief consultation with an ex-SEC lawyer, he stated he could find nothing illegal about this plan. Nevertheless, there are something like 30 different things we have to pull off to make this work, so we're going to try," he wrote.

The fundraising round, first reported by Re/code, came right as Reddit was dealing with broad criticism for its role in allowing users to disseminate stolen celebrity photos.

Altman was joined in the fundraising round by a list of notable names including Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, former Google developer Paul Bucheit and celebrities Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg.

Wong said in the blog post that the company was planning to expand its staff, which currently numbers more than 60, to work on a variety of areas including mobile, which Reddit has had trouble cracking. It recently re-entered the mobile space with an app for its popular Ask Me Anything series.