Popular news aggregation and discussion website Reddit has changed its terms of service, allowing users to earn, purchase or sell currencies and items that can be cryptographically verified. The change in terms also explicitly outlined a clear separation in the definition of non-tokenized Web 2 virtual goods and tokenized Web 3 virtual goods, with a member of the Reddit product team disclosing plans to sunset the former.
what signal and telegram did
Telegram has had crypto focus since ~2020, to the point of spamming me in chats with “sponsored” (official!) messages to buy their shady token a couple of years ago, and spawning a grey market to buy and sell usernames with crypto auctions.
Signal tried including an own crypto token for in-app psyments as well (of this bunch, it’s the only company I have some compassion for - they need to make money somehow, and didn’t want to compromise the core model) but the backlash was insane and they either hid it really deep in the app, or just gave up entirely