By
Tolu Ajiboye
March 22nd, 2024
The withdrawal is due to the latest change that was due after the Coinbase’s decision to discontinue the Merchant Tool product in favor of Coinbase Commerce.
While if you are thinking to upgrade or renew the RedditGold membership by making payments in Bitcoin, it is no more possible. As per the latest reports, Reddit is no more accepting Bitcoin payments for its premium membership program. However, it is unclear at this point whether the service has been temporarily disabled or whether it is a permanent decision to suspend Bitcoin payments.
Things came to light when one of the Reddit users noticed that he was unable to make Bitcoin payment in order to gift the Reddit Gold subscription. On Friday, many users started commenting on the /r/BTC subreddit wherein they talked that the only available payment options, for now, are PayPal and Credit Cards.
Five years back in February 2013, Reddit started accepting Bitcoin payments in a partnership with Coinbase. At that time, Bitcoin was trading at less than $25 and Coinbase used to process $1 million worth trades in a month’s time. Reddit staff engineer Brian Simpson then commented saying: “We’ve gotten some requests for additional payment methods so hopefully this brings us closer to reaching everyone who wants to buy gold.”
The Reddit administrator “emoney04” has confirmed this withdrawal saying that the latest change was due after the Coinbase’s decision to discontinue the Merchant Tool product in favor of Coinbase Commerce which allows “merchants to accept multiple cryptocurrencies directly into a user-controlled wallet.”
The admin said: “The upcoming Coinbase change, combined with some bugs around the bitcoin payment option that were affecting purchases for certain users, led us to remove bitcoin as a payment option.”
Coinbase Commerce that was launched last month brings a significant upgrade for merchants and it requires them to completely move to a new system, however, has not been much accepted by some businesses who see low volumes of cryptocurrency payments.
In one of the other comments, the admin noted that the Reddit platform might not consider it necessary enough to bring back the Bitcoin payment option to its platform even though any other payment processing platform apart from Coinbase. However, he said that company will likely wait before making any decision to re-enable it. The admin stated: “We’re going to take a look at demand and watch the progression of Coinbase Commerce before making a decision on whether to re-enable.”
Reddit that was founded in 2005 hosts more than 40 million users to its platform as on date. Although the membership on the Reddit platform is free, users can still support the platform by buying the Reddit Gold Membership. The membership programme provides additional features to the users on the website that allows the breakdown of their upvotes called ‘karma’ which gives them the ability to load more comments at once and provide access to a secret subreddit.