Social media giant Reddit revealed Thursday it had invested in BTC and ETH in a preliminary prospectus filed to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, as the San Francisco-based firm moves one step closer to its debut on the stock market.
“We invested some of our excess cash reserves in Bitcoin and Ether and also acquired Ether and MATIC as a form of payment for sales of certain virtual goods, which we may continue to do in the future,” Reddit wrote in its S-1 filing to the SEC.
In investing in the top two cryptocurrencies by market cap, Reddit would join a small group of companies, including MicroStrategy and Tesla, that hold cryptocurrencies directly in their corporate treasuries. Data from CoinGecko shows that MicroStrategy holds about 174,530 BTC, while Tesla’s BTC holdings stand at 10,500.
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However, Reddit noted in its prospectus that the net carrying value of all its cryptocurrency holdings was currently “immaterial.”
Active in the Crypto Space
Reddit, which has an average of 73.1 million daily active unique users, per the filing, has been a major player in the crypto ecosystem. For example, in 2022, the social network rolled out its NFT marketplace on the Polygon blockchain network.
Separately, Reddit distributed ERC-20 tokens to reward users who contributed to the platform by posting and commenting on various subreddits such as r/CryptoCurrency as part of its Community Points program. However, the firm decided to sunset the program in Oct. 2023, as reported by TechCrunch.
Reddit’s filing with the SEC on Thursday is a substantial step for the social media platform’s initial public offering, which would enable Reddit to raise capital and offer liquidity to its employees, as well as allow investors to buy shares of the stock, which will be listed on NYSE under the ticker RDDT.
“We hope going public will provide meaningful benefits to our community as well. Our users have a deep sense of ownership over the communities they create on Reddit,” wrote Reddit’s co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman in the prospectus. “We want this sense of ownership to be reflected in real ownership—for our users to be our owners. Becoming a public company makes this possible.”
