Social media site Reddit is abandoning its Collectible Expressions feature, which created animations based on users’ Collectible Avatars NFTs.
The news was revealed on a Reddit help page, which reads: “As of August 5, 2024, Collectible Expressions will no longer be supported on Reddit. In some cases you may be able to view them from past comments, but they cannot be used for future comments .”
Collectible Expressions build on Reddit’s Collectible Avatars, a series of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Polygon blockchain. The NFTs were extremely popular when they launched. Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal even claimed they were proof that Reddit had “cracked the NFT code.”
The Collectible Expressions introduced a selection of animated expressions that “bring your avatar to life by using the animated expression as a comment”, and are available in a limited selection of subreddits, at the discretion of the community moderators.
According to a Dune Analytics dashboard, more than 33 million Collectible Avatars have been minted to date, with a market cap of $43 million. Collectible Avatars are available in free and premium variants, with the free variant making up the majority of variants released.
At the same time, a newly appointed Collectible Avatars Lead announced that the r/CollectibleAvatars community would be limited and become an official announcement channel, teasing “exciting new updates and plans to share.”
The promised plans include ‘new community partnerships’ and ‘even more events and activities’, while the Collectible Avatars team stressed that the ‘collectible ecosystem is still going strong’.
Reddit previously reined in some of its crypto-related projects by deprecating its ‘Community Points’ reward tokens on the Arbitrum Nova scaling network in October 2023. At the time, Reddit cited concerns about resources and the “regulatory environment” as reasons for shutting down the project, which was then taken over by a decentralized group of Reddit users.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.