Reddit NFT Head Exits Team, Holder Concerns Reach Fever Pitch

• Around 30 million people own Reddit Collectible Avatars.
• Reddit’s NFT sales topped $20 million in their first months of launch in 2022.
• Reddit has steadily shuttered Web3 and crypto initiatives since 2023.

Reddit’s Collectible Avatars (RCAs) project leader has announced that they’ll be departing, leaving holders of the platform’s non-fungible tokens (NFTs) concerned for the future of the program.

If Reddit’s NFT venture should fail, it will follow a long line of major brand-backed NFT offerings that never quite managed to live beyond their initial hype.

Reddit NFT Head Leads Exits

Reddit’s Head of Collectible Avatars, Bianca Wyler, has announced that she is stepping down from her role. This leaves millions of RCA holders uncertain about who will be heading up the project or if it will be moving forward at all.

Wyler was hired to lead the RCA project in June 2024 and has had a pretty tough job heading up the NFT project, which lacks a clear future vision.

At the same time Wyler was appointed to lead RCA, she and Reddit announced that Reddit would be rolling back “Collectible Expressions,” which was built with animated features based on users’ RCAs.

This comes just over a year after Reddit abandoned its crypto reward program.

RCAs Gone for Good?

Initially launched in July 2022, RCAs were pitched as unique collectible NFTs on the Polygon blockchain. They were a cute way for users to give their Reddit profiles a little bit of Web3 dazzle and gain access to some perks on the platform.

According to Dune dashboards, despite trading sales and secondary sales volumes being way down from their multi-million 2022 highs, the total number of RCA holders is somewhere between 29 and 33.5 million .

This means that millions of users will be affected if the entire program is scrapped. Reddit’s NFT collectors are unsure if they’ll be able to access their RCAs should the program be shuttered entirely.

According to one user, the RCA agreement states they will fund the artwork storage on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for two years, though it’s stored off-chain. However, another user notes that since the RCA artwork is hosted on IPFS, the artwork is permanent if it touches enough nodes.

Of course, this isn’t enough of a guarantee. The content could disappear over time if the initial hosts remove pinning support. This perhaps pokes a hole in the “ownership” and “permanent” nature of NFTs often touted by creators and project backers.

At this point, the future of millions of RCA holders looks uncertain.