A Rookie Knocks Reddit’s NFT Marketplace Out of the Park

Although Pali Bhat impressed Reddit CEO Steve Huffman during interviews to become the company’s first chief product officer last year, Huffman told Fast Company that he had been concerned that Pali hadn't worked on something like Reddit before. Reddit described the new CPO role in part as leading and facilitating the creation of tools and features that bring community and a sense of belonging to Reddit, and Google, where Pali was former vice president of product and design at Google Cloud, was a different kind of consumer internet.

Bhat’s experience was with developer tools at Google, and Reddit is a community of niche communities, called subreddits, that focus on narrowly but deeply on hundreds of thousands of topics.

Bhat was hired anyway and already has proven he gets Reddit pretty well.

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In October, less than a year after he took the job, Bhat announced that 2.5 million users have opened Reddit Vault Wallets since July, when Reddit launched its non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace. Meanwhile, the leading NFT marketplace, four-year-old OpenSea, has about 2.3 million users in total.

It is a big victory for Reddit. In late October, Spooky Season, created by Reddit user poieeeyee as a part of the Collectible Avatars Creator Program, had a trading volume of 538 ether (ETH) over several hours, just behind the blue chip NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club at 642 ETH at that time. Reddit NFTs have brought in over $11 million to date, according to data from blockchain data platform Dune Analytics.

Reddit’s NFT success is even more remarkable given that it has taken place during crypto winter. The NFT market overall has dropped 97% in total sales volume from its January 2022 peak. Reddit's success highlights the potential for NFTs, outperforming NFT initiatives from social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, according to a report by Coinbase.

Now that Bhat has proven spectacularly that he can get Redditors over the first hurdle of buying and selling NFTs by opening wallets, he faces the same challenge as other NFT marketplaces: keeping them engaged, and buying.