Reddit Likely to Bring Back Bitcoin , Ethereum and Litecoin payment Support
Cryptocurrency payments will likely be returning to popular social media platform Reddit, a company executive said on Wednesday.
Reddit CTO Christopher Slowe made this revelation during an interview with financial news outlet Cheddar, explaining that cryptocurrency payments will likely return to the platform once Coinbase finishes upgrading its merchant platform to Coinbase Commerce and the social media giant completes a website redesign.
The company had accepted bitcoin payments for Reddit Gold for years but abruptly removed this payment option in March.
Slowe said that they did so for a variety of reasons, ranging from Coinbase’s payment platform revamp to rising bitcoin transaction fees to the fact that the company — which is currently doing a complete website redesign — does not currently have the time to upgrade its API to the new Coinbase merchant system.
“We just didn’t have time to upgrade our current API integration, and once the redesign… is landing, I think we’ll see crypto payments come back,” he said.
Notably, Slowe also said that Reddit — whose platform houses forums for nearly every cryptocurrency community — will likely add support for other cryptocurrencies as well.
In fact, he said that the company had looked into adding more cryptocurrencies in the past but that its Coinbase API version did not provide merchants with the ability to accept altcoins.
“We have been looking at other cryptocurrencies,” he said. “We are looking at Ethereum and Litecoin that are provided by Coinbase as well.”
Both ethereum and litecoin are available to merchants through Coinbase Commerce, and though Slowe did not specifically refer to it in his remarks, so is bitcoin cash. Consequently, it would not be surprising if Reddit users can soon purchase premium subscriptions using four cryptocurrencies instead of one.
However, Slowe did not provide a specific timeline for when Reddit will bring back cryptocurrency payments, merely stating that it would likely happen once the company finishes its redesign.