Get in fast.
Twelve years later.

The ticker gets built in public

An announcement thread goes up on bitcointalk with the full specification attached. Scrypt. Kimoto Gravity Well for difficulty retargeting. An IPO. A hard launch date. The whole thing is fleshed out in the open by people who had already watched Dogecoin come out of the same forums two months earlier.

The thread stops. The ticker stays free.

Reddit tries the same idea, with equity behind it

Six months later Reddit closes a $50m round and announces something nobody had done: it plans to hand ten percent of the round back to its own users. The mechanism it reaches for is a coin.

Wong noted the investors had signed off on it in their terms, that an ex-SEC lawyer could find nothing illegal in the plan, and that roughly thirty separate things had to go right for it to work. Sam Altman, who led the round, described the shape of it plainly: a coin backed one-to-one by a share, redeemable for that share if the company ever went public.

Reddit hired cryptocurrency engineers for it. Then the plan quietly died, the CEO left, and ten years passed. Reddit went public in March 2024 under RDDT. The shares arrived. The coin never did.