On 18 June, Reddit and The Ethereum Foundation issued “The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-off”, a challenge to find the best fully decentralized scaling solution that will support hundreds of thousands of Community Points users on a mainnet. Initially, there was no award offered to the winner, but after attracting criticism from Redditors, the Maker Foundation announced, on July 2, a prize of 25,000 Dai.
The so-called “Community Points” will take the form of ERC-20 tokens and will serve as a reward system for subreddits. The website is inviting Ethereum scaling solutions that will not only focus on the exchange use cases but also take into consideration the costs of obtaining tokens. Each subreddit community will be able to customize their points and decide how they will be used on a thread.
In the official statement, the Maker Foundation claims that MakerDAO, along with the entire DeFi ecosystem, will greatly benefit from the Ethereum developer community. The company also says that, for the future scaling of Dai, one of the most popular decentralized stablecoins, powering the growth of Ethereum is essential.
The winner of the competition will be chosen by
Reddit and the Ethereum Foundation. Participants can submit their proposals as
a comment to the official post by July 31. The organizers also welcome public
opinion towards the submitted demos to create a better understanding of the
trade-offs and compromises between different solutions.
The requirements for the scaling solutions have also been clearly stated in the official post. Over a 5-day period, the PoC must be able to handle at least 100,000 point claims, 25,000 subscriptions, 100,000 transfers, and 75,000 one-off points burnings.
Some additional demands are required for the successful development of the project. The solutions must be decentralized and not depend on any single third-party providers. They should also provide a simple end-user experience and compatibility with outside apps. Redditors must have complete ownership and control over their points.
The challenge is open to any great minds in the blockchain space that are working on scaling solutions and want to benefit hundreds of millions of Reddit users across the world. Once the winner has been chosen, the Maker Foundation will reach out to them and arrange the reception of the award.