Reddit is one of the winners of Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Awards. Explore the full list of projects we’re honoring for making the world more equitable, accessible, and sustainable.

At its philosophical heart, crypto beats with radical thinking. It’s powered by the belief that society’s ownership structure could be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up, with the personal autonomy of the blockchain. But in 2022, the nascent Web3 industry had to reckon with the fact that its practical reality was shaping up quite differently from its theoretical ideals.

As investors lost billions after billions of dollars, in a string of market crashes caused by scams, hacks, and spectacular project failures, the word “crypto” acquired a dangerous, near-radioactive connotation. But then—just as crypto’s reputation seemed to hit rock bottom—Reddit smashed records with a blockbuster NFT collection, released last July. It’s the winner of Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Award in the Crypto and Blockchain category.

How did the company do it? By dropping the anti-NFT of NFTs. Reddit’s collection is a series of artsy doodles of its signature mascot, sketched by members of its own community and beyond, which are registered on the Polygon blockchain and can be bought and sold as custom “profile pictures” on the site—basically, the classic definition of NFTs. But notably, the collection never once used the term “NFT”—calling them only “blockchain-backed Collectible Avatars.” It was an intentional pivot from the company’s mentality just the year before, when it released its first set of branded NFTs.

Today, “we prefer to focus on Redditors, their communities, and the value they receive, rather than the underlying technologies,” says Pali Bhat, Reddit’s chief product officer.

What exactly is that value? “Artists and creators are now able to earn royalties from secondary sales,” Bhat says. Reddit put out a call for artists in its community to be part of the project, using a public application form, referrals, and a network of fans to find and select creatives from subreddits like r/Comics and r/AdobeIllustrator, who then drew some of the avatar designs—from rainbow-tie-dyed squiggle figures to Halloween-tinged brain-dead zombies. The artists kept the revenue from mint sales, minus fees to Reddit and third-party platforms, and royalties on resales are split 50/50 between Reddit and the artists.

An NFT project that benefits the community isn’t new, but it’s one that’s struggled to achieve success in the real world, especially as crypto began to collapse under the weight of its own hype. But Reddit made it work: The first round of avatars quickly sold out, cracking OpenSea’s list of top 10 collections for 24-hour trading volume, and even knocking the famous CryptoPunks out of the number one spot. By the end of the year, Reddit users had minted more than 5 million NFTs in Reddit’s marketplace. Since the project’s launch, artists have earned over $1 million.

It may seem like an unlikely success—but on second look, it may not. “Reddit has always been a model for what decentralization could look like online,” says Bhat. “Our communities are self-built and run.”

“As we look ahead,” he adds, “we have an opportunity to provide more avenues for Redditors to make a living on the platform.” In other words, it’s working to turn its community of 430 million monthly users across the globe into a place where creatives can boast true ownership of their art—and also, bringing crypto back to its roots. Imagine that.