Kin (KIN) Review – A Decentralized Ecosystem of Digital Services for Daily Life

Kin wants to foster an open and decentralized ecosystem that does not compromise user experience or privacy. At the same time, it will be an alternative to the current giants like Facebook and Google that monopolize online ad revenue. The company is introducing its cryptocurrency, Kin, to its messaging app and will create a system that gives the coin real value, as opposed to current in-app currencies which cannot be exchange for fiat currency.

Article Summary

• The Idea and the Team Behind Kin
• Kin Partnerships
• Kin Price History
• The Kin Technology
• The Kin Network
• How to Purchase Kin
• How to Store Kin
• Roadmap and Future Updates

The Idea and the Team Behind Kin

Kin is being developed by Kik Interactive, a Canadian messaging app with over 300 million users worldwide that is now seeking to build its own blockchain. Instead of the current economic model that sells attention and data to advertisers, Kin will incentivize users to earn and spend Kin by using the messaging service or by interacting with brands.

The name Kin means family and represents the connectedness between people in the community. The ecosystem will be a family of apps that will all work together.

“I think right now we’re on a path where digital services power everything we do in our daily lives,” says Ted, who has led Kik from the beginning. “But they are all controlled and owned by a very few number of companies. To me, honestly, that’s a bit of a scary future.” The Kin team also includes Alex Frenkel, VP of Product, who worked at Sears Israel and Get Taxi, and Dany Fishel, EVP of Kin Partnership, co-founder of Rounds (acquired by Kik in 2016).

The long-term goal of Kin is the creation of a new economic model for digital consumers that will make Kin the primary transaction in its chat app, increasing the number of participants and transactions. The Kin cryptocurrency was originally planned to be an ERC20 token run on the Ethereum blockchain, but it is now scheduled to migrate to the Stellar network.  After the new blockchain is built, the Kin Foundation will serve to oversee that the infrastructure is open and decentralized.

The Kik team has over 150 employees with offices in Waterloo, Toronto, New York City and Tel Aviv. The team has an established reputation in the messaging industry, being the first app to become a platform as well as the first western app to integrate bots. They have previous positions at top organizations like Google, AOL Time Warner, Citizens Business Bank and Spotify.

Kin Partnerships

Sperry’s and Dunkin’ Dunuts have experimented using Kin as well as Unity, a multi-platform game engine and Blackhawk, a gift card network. Blackhawk can introduce hundreds of partner brands to the app that can also experiment with Kin.

The company also has support from leading investment companies such as Polychain and Blockchain Capital. Prior to Kin, Tencent and Union Square ventures invested in Kik.

Kin Price History

Kin’s ICO, which took place September of last year raised 168,732 ETH, the equivalent of $50 million at that time. Although the team raised another $50 million in private funding before their ICO, it did not meet their original goal to raise $125 million. Perhaps this was due to regulations that did not permit Canadians to purchase the coin as well as transactions being limited to only via Ether.

Kin’s price peaked at the beginning of January, when it reached a market cap of $1 billion and the token itself was worth $0.001, compared with its ICO price of $0.0001.

The price has recently surged over 70%, perhaps in preparation of the migration to the Stellar blockchain or the company’s plans to speak at consensus. The admission of new partners to their ecosystem (as well as a possible future listing on Coinbase and Korean exchange Coinbit) may also affect the price of the token.

The Kin Technology

Kik is the 7^th most popular social network according to AppAnnie.  The platform is targeted to teens and young adults, with 57% of the user base falling between the ages of 13 to 24. The size of the user base makes it a good place for its user to adopt cryptocurrency.

To demonstrate this, Kik ran an experiment before starting to develop Kin. They found that since their platform had 740,000 daily transactions of Ethereum each day, they could introduce a concept called Kik points to prove the possibility of mass adoption of their Kin currency. The experiment proved successful, with users spending their points on 74 million purchases.

In early 2017, Kik purchased Rounds, a video chat app maker based out of Tel Aviv that has a lot of experience developing products for the teen market.

The team recently shifted gears, moving from the Ethereum blockchain to Stellar. Until the full launch of the decentralized system, Kin will have a dual token system and allow you to purchase KINs as both an ERC20 token and a Stellar token. Each will have the same token value.

The Kin Network

Kin tokens will be fixed at the amount of 10 trillion. The profit from the token distribution is used to fund Kik operations as well as the Kin Foundation. Some of the profit will be used for development of the Kin platform.

Here is the allocation of the tokens:

• 1 trillion were offered during the 2-week ICO (this is the entire liquid supply of tokens)
• 3 trillion are pre-allocated to Kik (10% of which will be released per quarter for 10 quarters according to a vesting schedule)
• 6 million are under control of the Kin Foundation (up to 5% of which will be used for operations and marketing, 20% will be released to ecosystem partners)

Tokens will be distributed once Kik’s technology can integrate with Kin and the digital currency can be used within the ecosystem.

The table below shows how much KIN will be introduced into the ecosystem each year:

Kin’s tokens, or KINs, can be earned by creating valuable content, curating content or by offering digital goods and services to the community. Spending KINs promotes more valuable use of the platform, such as: the creation of VIP groups, premium user generated content, shoutout messages, tipping, bot monetization (having bots do useful tasks), and brand missions (completing a survey).

Tokens will be distributed periodically via the Kin Rewards Engine based on the amount of value users provided to Kin users at the day.

How to Purchase KIN

Kin’s ICO coincided with stricter regulations from the Securities and Exchange Commision (SEC). This is the reason it is not on larger exchanges.

It is available, however, on the following exchanges:

• HitBTC (Trade KIN with ETH on HitBTC)
• Bancor Network (Trade KIN with BNT on Bancor)
• Mercatox (Trade KIN with BTC on Mercatox)
• IDEX (Trade KIN with ETH on IDEX)
• EtherDelta (ForkDelta) (Trade KIN with ETH on EtherDelta)

How to Store KIN

KIN can be stored in any wallet that supports ERC-20 tokens such as Coinomi, MetaMask and Myetherwallet.

For maximum security, however, you should store your KIN on hardware wallets such as Ledger Nano S and Trezor.

Kin will soon have its own mobile wallet, Kinit. The company has already completed beta testing of the first version of Kinit on college campuses.

Roadmap and Future Updates

According to schedule, the company has already released a beta version of their digital wallet, Kinnit, for Kik users within the messaging app. The public release is scheduled for later in 2018.  After this, the Kin Rewards Engine will be launched to incentivize the use of the platform. The achievement of these two goals in 2018 will be major milestones for the company.

In addition, Kins will seek partners to join its ecosystem.