The popular subreddit r/CryptoCurrency has joined SushiSwap’s dual rewards program Onsen to provide liquidity providers (LPs) with exchange fees, SUSHI, and MOON rewards.
The key objective, according to a governance post from February, is to deepen the MOON token liquidity.
SushiSwap’s business development lead Truda Hamzik said the team was “honored to have established a connection with the r/CryptoCurrency team and have intentions to maintain a close working relationship with the team going forward.”
They told Decrypt that "it all started when we came across their governance proposal. I then reached out to the team and drafted a simple article to help them understand how our Onsen program worked and got on a call with the team to clarify the questions." A day later, the team said, "they were onboard."
A fork of the popular decentralized exchange, SushiSwap is a trading and lending platform for various cryptocurrencies. SUSHI is the project’s native governance token, letting holders vote and propose changes to the platform.
MOON is the native token of the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit, the largest crypto-focused community on Reddit, with over 6.1 million users. Members of the community can earn MOON tokens by contributing to the subreddit. The tokens can be stored on Reddit's mobile app-based crypto wallet called Vault, which is compatible with Ethereum’s MetaMask wallet.
The token can also be used to rent out advertisements in the subreddit, vote on polls, and other activities. Banner rentals have been infrequent, however, with advertisers indicating that purchasing MOON to rent a banner can increase the token's price due to its low liquidity.
The new rewards program offers an extra 1,260 MOON daily, worth around $292 at current prices, and 7.5 SUSHI per day. LPs can earn a total of 11.73% from trading fees generated by other users swapping in and out of ETH and MOON, and another 35.47% in both MOON and SUSHI tokens for participating.
Since the new incentive was launched, the ETH-MOON pool’s liquidity currently hovers around $335,000. The additional rewards will increase the circulating supply of MOON by 0.5% at the current rate.
Reddit adopting Web3 with open arms
The MOON-WETH pool is the second largest on Arbitrum Nova behind WETH-USDC. Arbitrum Nova is the second layer-2 solution from the Arbitrum team, offering lower transactions tailored more for gaming and social applications.
Besides MOON, the Ethereum-based rollup also hosts the official cryptocurrency BRICK of another popular subreddit in r/FortniteBR with over 2.2 million members.
Hamzik of SushiSwap said that they are "currently trying to get in contact with the Fortnite mods to see if we can execute something similar (for their $BRICK token), though it's tougher as most of them are not crypto-native."
The Reddit team has also banked on the NFT hype by being one of the first mainstream platforms to enable a profile picture integration with NFTs. It partnered with Polygon to distribute free NFT avatars to over 3 million users.