Reddit Users Have Minted More Than 5 Million NFT Avatars on Polygon

Reddit’s push into tokenized avatars has been a rare bright spot amid declining NFT sales and a wider crypto market in turmoil, and now the Polygon-based initiative has marked a new milestone with more than 5 million of the collectibles minted to date.

The Reddit Collectible Avatars NFT initiative crossed the 5 million mark over the past 24 hours, according to blockchain data curated on a Dune dashboard. They’re not highly concentrated among high-value NFT collectors (or whales), either, as the project has more than 4.25 million total unique wallets. About 3.95 million of those wallets hold a single Reddit NFT.

Reddit, the popular online discussion platform, announced plans to launch NFT avatars in July, tapping Ethereum sidechain network Polygon to offer up both free and premium avatars. The vast majority of the minted NFTs to date have been free avatars offered to heavy users of the site, which spans millions of separate communities (or subreddits).

In October, Reddit Chief Product Officer Pali Bhat announced that more than three million Polygon wallets had been created by users to collect its NFTs. The announcement spurred a surge in prices and trading for the premium avatars in the collection, yielding millions of dollars worth of secondary market sales in a matter of days.

The speculative bubble around Reddit’s premium NFTs was short-lived, with only about $700,000 worth of sales taking place over the past month. All told, the Reddit NFTs have yielded about $11.85 million worth of secondary trades to date—well below top traded projects like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which notched $61.6 million over the last 30 days alone.

Reddit’s NFT program, however, remains a notable example of how Web2 platforms can spur potentially massive adoption of Web3 technology through giveaways.

In fact, the amount of NFTs being minted through the initiative has only accelerated recently. On December 3, more than 250,000 of the Polygon NFTs were minted, setting a new daily record and beating a previous single-day peak from August.

Reddit is one of several major brands building on Polygon, joining the likes of Meta with its Instagram NFT minting initiative, Starbucks with its just-launched Web3 rewards program, and Nike with its upcoming digital apparel platform.