How Reddit Crypto-Pilled the COVID Generation with Easy-to-Purchase Collectible Avatars on Polygon PoS

430M active monthly users, Polygon at their fingertips

Polygon Labs

March 27, 2025

Since launching collectible avatars in 2022 as the pandemic wound down, Reddit has onboarded millions to crypto by making avatar ownership effortless.

Buying, selling, minting, and collecting Reddit’s Collectible Avatar NFTs on the Polygon Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network is as seamless as clicking. Buying avatars can happen directly through Reddit, which boasts over 430M active monthly users. By integrating with Polygon, an entire microgeneration of casual users were turned on to crypto: Over 30 million avatars have been minted, generating more than $18 million in sales.

This simple, user-centric approach shows that Web3’s greatest challenges, like wallet interfaces and on/offramps, can be tamed to create superior user experience. A taste of how easy Polygon makes it for apps to turn on payments for digital (or physical!) goods.

Below, discover the Reddit story. Learn how a Web2 juggernaut turned to Polygon to help millions of users dive headfirst into NFTs through the Collectible Avatar program—and in the process, fueled mainstream Web3 adoption.

Millions onboarded to crypto without knowing it

Any avatar collector in the last three years has onboarded to crypto without knowing it.

Reddit is home to hundreds of millions of active monthly users, with a culture that foregrounds open dialogue and user collaboration. In short, Reddit is the perfect environment for driving forward the adoption of new ideas—especially blockchain projects that thrive on community input.

Polygon enabled Reddit users to discover NFTs in a way that felt natural.

Adoption hasn’t relied on crypto-savvy collectors alone; it has thrived because Reddit’s broad user base finds the experience genuinely frictionless.

Reddit makes the process as simple as a click. Users don’t have to grapple with complicated crypto wallets and the (ongoing) UX issues that hinder mainstream adoption. Setting up a wallet happens automatically, minting avatars feels like buying a digital sticker, and users are free to trade or flaunt them within the subreddit ecosystem.

From free releases to custom, curated artist drops, users have followed different paths to end up in the same place.

A free drop soon after Gen 1 onboarded 3.7M users; special giveaways for major events like the World Cup and NFL taught vast new audiences about blockchain digital ownership. Each time users claim a free avatar, a Polygon wallet is created behind the scenes, bringing users into the experience of NFT ownership without the intimidation of dealing with crypto exchanges. A zero-cost entry highlights the speed, reliability, and low fees of Polygon PoS. By normalizing the process, Reddit effectively showcases how apps can break out when they build on Polygon.

And in the years since Collectible Avatars launched, the community has only evolved. The r/AvatarTrading subreddit has over 31k active subscribers talking all things RCAs. A community-centric marketplace like rcax.io was built by Redditors who want even more ways to showcase, trade, and collect.

This is how you welcome millions into a decentralized future.

Bringing holders to the aggregated future

What does the endgame look like for a new generation of crypto-pilled users?

One word: aggregation.

When Polygon PoS joins the Agglayer (updates on this soon™ 👀), it’ll be part of a wave of chains that decide walled gardens are bad, user experience matters, and it’s better to go it together than fragment the emerging trustless internet.

Agglayer is the future. Polygon PoS is the vehicle to getting users there. And Reddit is the accelerator.