Reddcoin aims to be a cryptocurrency narrowly tailored for social media platform use, something the team believes is a key catalyst for mainstream cryptocurrency adoption. Tipping, purchasing content, storing donations, and general social-based monetary exchange is a growing practice that Reddcoin hopes to direct toward the cryptocurrency market.

Larry Ren, Reddcoin’s lead developer, explains Reddcoins utility in terms of monetizing user-generated content (e.g. likes, shares, retweets) via a cryptocurrency token that is designed to become a “social unit of account” across these online media platforms. The volume of emotive interactions like “likes” is something Reddcoin hopes to expand and financialize.

Reddcoin switched from proof of work (PoW) consensus to proof of stake velocity (PoSV) on August 2, 2014. The Reddcoin developer team is dissatisfied by certain design trade offs made by PoW and PoS (e.g. miner incentives or initial distribution, respectively). PoSV is designed to facilitate faster, smoother exchange of coins between network participants, a useful feature for social media platform interfacing. PoSV also relies on the monetary theory that higher currency velocity causes a stronger economic market. For Reddcoin, PoS too heavily incentivizes hoarding and PoW restricts the monetary supply (ergo circulation) too severely. High stake velocity is a signal that Reddcoin’s goals for the protocol are being met.

PoSV does borrow from PoS in that forking is very difficult, at least. Reddcoin references forking in terms of “cloning”, and cloning a protocol would confuse users, according to Reddcoin. Preventing protocol cloning via certain PoSV characteristics makes that consensus mechanism very important to the team’s goals.