The CTO of social media platform Reddit has revealed that the company is considering reinstating cryptocurrencies for payments, including bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin.
Speaking in an interview with Cheddar, Chris Slowe, the site’s chief technology officer, explained that it was down to high fees on the bitcoin network and a lack of time to update the Coinbase API integration to accept bitcoin payments, that the company dropped the cryptocurrency as a payment option last month.
At the time, Reddit said that it was due to a ‘Coinbase change’ and ‘some bugs around the bitcoin payment option that were affecting purchases for certain users,’ as the reasons for its removal.
However, it now seems that the company is planning on reintroducing the cryptocurrency payment option. Notably, though, it’s not just bitcoin that Reddit is thinking about making available.
“We’ve been looking at other cryptocurrencies,” said Slowe. “As a matter of fact, that was part of the issue with the high fees on the bitcoin network. We are looking at ethereum and litecoin that are both provided by Coinbase.”
News of this comes at a time when Reddit’s co-founder Alexis Ohanian, said yesterday that he thinks ethereum will outpace bitcoin in terms of gains by the end of 2018. In a report from TermSheet, Ohanian said that while he still holds some bitcoin, he’s ‘bullish about ethereum simply because people are actually building on it.’
When asked to give a figure as to where bitcoin and ethereum will be by the end of the year, he said that bitcoin will reach $20,000 and ethereum will be worth $15,000.
He’s not the only one that’s confident of where the second most valuable cryptocurrency is heading; however, he’s probably one of the few that has given such a high value to it. Last month, Nigel Green, founder and CEO of deVere Group, said that he believed the ether token would be valued at $2,500 by the end of the year.