Newsbtc.com just published an article regarding the future outlook of Reddit regarding Cryptocurrency payments. Chief technology officer Chris Slowe has been interviewed on Cheddar, a site that is dealing with business and tech news.

Bitcoin was between the first major platforms who enabled Bitcoin payments back in 2013, this was during the first years where Bitcoin gained traction and has been talked about in the media.

The social media hub has allowed users to use Bitcoin for the Reddit Gold Membership, which unlocked certain features and also acted as a form of donation towards the site so it can stay less dependent from sponsoring. The company stopped accepting Bitcoin payments during early 2018 quoting problems with their Coinbase Commerce integration, but hinted that they will monitor the demand closely and will re-enable if certain criteria is met:

.@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

Now in the interview Chris also mentioned that this was only one of the problems, another was the fees that the Bitcoin network had to suffer under, which was a direct result of the bull market and the mass purchasing spree that came between late 2017 and early 2018. During this period fees skyrocketed on the network reaching several USD per transaction when the users wanted to jump in on the next few blocks to get their transactions confirmed faster.

Since then several changes have taken place on the network, one of them was the addition of SegWit, which was a direct blocksize increase. Exchanges and traffic hubs adopting it resulted in bigger blocks and also transaction fees going lower, but another thing helped is that Bitcoin’s price corrected as well meaning that people were not rushing to exchanges anymore and the steadily growing adoption rates could continue. SegWit was also needed for the ability to integrate the Lightning Network as a second layer scaling method meaning that in the future most micro transactions might migrate to this new layer. This might help Reddit in re-enabling Bitcoin payments as well, but there was no word yet from this possible path.

Ethereum and Litecoin are a stable choice between Cryptocurrencies as both have faster blocktimes and bigger blocks resulting in lower fees generally. Ethereum is debatable in this sense as currently ICOs running on the chain could possibly clog up the network, but there are already scaling plans on the table as Vitalik Buterin just recently hinted at sharding coming to the network sometime soon. The reasoning for the additional 2 currencies was that Coinbase has since integrated these new payment options as well.