Reddit Pulls the Plug on Community Points, Collapsing MOON, BRICK and DONUT

Introduced in 2020, 'Community Points' was Reddit's roughly three-year experiment in a blockchain-based rewards system. It let participating subreddits issue their own tradable tokens, earned through community contribution and distributed at moderators' discretion. The most prominent were MOON in r/CryptoCurrency, BRICK in r/Fortnite, and the community-run DONUT in r/ethtrader. Over time these tokens developed real secondary-market value and active trading economies, and Reddit promoted the program as a way to give users a financial stake in — and a reward for building — the communities they participated in.

On October 17, 2023, a Reddit team member announced on r/CryptoCurrency that Community Points, along with associated special memberships, would be retired, with a wind-down completing in early November (reported as around November 8). Reddit's director of consumer and product communications said that while the company had seen some future opportunities for Community Points, 'the resourcing needed was unfortunately too high to justify,' adding that 'the regulatory environment has since added to that effort.'

The market reaction was swift and severe. On the news, MOON fell roughly 85%, BRICK dropped close to 70%, and DONUT declined around 60% within hours, erasing much of the value users had accumulated through participation. Because many holders had treated the tokens as genuine assets — buying, trading, and in some cases holding meaningful balances — the collapse imposed real losses on individual users.

The community reaction was angry, and a recurring framing was to call the shutdown a 'rug pull.' That label is contested: in its strict sense a rug pull describes developers maliciously abandoning a project and absconding with investor funds, and Reddit did not profit from the token collapse or vanish with proceeds. But many r/CryptoCurrency members used the term to capture the felt experience — that a centralized company had unilaterally terminated a financialized rewards economy and that ordinary holders, not the company, bore the entire downside. Reactions varied across the affected subreddits, with some communities more resigned than others.

The episode, arriving alongside the later unwinding of Reddit's NFT-avatar features, came to mark the company's broader retreat from crypto. Its lasting significance is as a cautionary case in the financialization of online engagement: when a platform builds a token economy on top of community participation, the tokens may behave like assets to the people earning them while remaining entirely at the discretion of the company that created them — so a single product decision can wipe out user-held value overnight.