This story has been updated with information about the apparent error in the MOON smart contract.
In defiance of Reddit's apparent wishes, crypto traders have devised a way to exchange the social platform’s ‘community points’ tokens for fiat — and it’s resulted in a pretty surprising market cap.
In May Reddit announced it would begin distributing ERC-20 rewards tokens on the Rinkeby testnet among users of its cryptocurrency and Fortnite subcommunities in the form of ‘MOONs’ and ‘BRICKs.’ The tokens are distributed according to a user's contributions to the respective subreddits.
xMOON pairings appeared on xDai network exchange Honeyswap last week after Reddit introduced a feature allowing Moons to be converted into ‘coins’.
MOON holders can now trade the tokens by converting them to xMOON via xmoon.exchange, and then exchanging the xMOONs for xDAI — which can be converted to the stablecoin DAI 1:1 — via Honeyswap.
Reddit’s crypto community token is currently changing hands on Honeyswap for $0.088 worth of xDAI. Pairings for xMOON have generated $174,000 in volume over the past 24 hours.
According to Etherscan, more than 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (30 septillion) MOONs have been distributed to roughly 7,800 addresses, meaning that the token’s market capitalization is roughly $2.66 septillion.
By contrast, the entire global economy was worth roughly $133 trillion in 2019, suggesting that the creation of MOONs has increased the value of the world’s economy by close to 2 trillion percent. Who said crypto wasn’t good for the economy?
However, it seems more than possible this is just a badly written smart contract for Moon that incorrectly states the token's supply is around 30 septillion. MOON's stated supply of 30 million tokens would instead give the project a market cap $2.64 million — which is much less amusing.
After trading for approximately $0.015 for its first two days of trading, xMOON rallied to post all-times of $0.35 on September 26, before retracing back to $0.055 by September 30.
Reddit is currently hosting a contest for developers working on scaling solutions that could facilitate the launch of the platform’s tokens on the Ethereum (ETH) mainnet, ideally before 2021.