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BRICK, the crypto reward token given out in Reddit’s subreddit community around the popular video game Fortnite, saw a significant surge in value Wednesday, rising 131% in price over the course of the day.
Per data from CoinGecko, BRICK went from an early-day low of just under $0.075 to a peak of about $0.173 by the end of the day Wednesday, more than doubling in price in less than 24 hours. BRICK buzz has since cooled, with the token currently trading for about $0.125, still representing a 35% jump over the past 24 hours as of this writing.
What prompted the sudden pop, however, isn’t entirely clear. Reddit’s Fortnite community didn’t make any significant announcements or changes this week, nor were they any substantial moves around the actual Fortnite game. BRICK is not officially linked to Fortnite or creator Epic Games, and was simply created by and for the Reddit community.
What’s more likely is that limited liquidity led to substantial price shifts as one or more users bought and sold the tokens. BRICK has a market cap of just $15.6 million, according to CoinGecko, with 24-hour trading volume of just over $1 million.
The vast majority of that trading volume was conducted on Kraken. CoinGecko estimates that if a user bought just $165 worth of BRICK via Kraken's BRICK/USD pair, it could increase the price by 2%, And it would only take a user selling $199 worth of the token to cause the price to slip by 2%. BRICK 24-hour trading volume has typically been below the $100,000 mark over the past month.
BRICK was first launched in 2020 as a trial run by Reddit to use crypto tokens as a way to reward the online messaging platform’s most fervent users. Called “Community Points,” Reddit debuted BRICK tokens for the Fortnite community and MOON tokens for the r/cryptocurrency subreddit.
Initially, the tokens were on an Ethereum testnet and difficult to transact, although some enterprising traders figured how to exchange them for other tokens and cash out. Officially, the tokens can be used within each respective subreddit to unlock features, vote in governance polls, and other functionality.
In 2022, Reddit announced that both tokens would migrate to Arbitrum Nova, an Ethereum scaling network, making them easier to access and potentially use within other apps as well. As of this writing, Reddit has yet to expand the Community Points program to other communities.
Reddit’s MOON tokens also saw a lesser pop in price and trading momentum late Wednesday, perhaps triggered by enthusiasm around BRICK. According to CoinGecko, MOON is up 10% over the last 24 hours to a price of $0.217, with about $610,000 worth of trading volume over the past day.
Both BRICK and MOON set all-time high prices over the summer, years after their original debut. BRICK hit a peak of $0.397 in August, while MOON reached $0.577 in July. Prices for both surged in August after Kraken added support for them.