Kik, a Canadian instant messaging social platform, announced the launch of its own digital currency Kin, which will allow users to purchase a series of digital services through it. The digital currency, called Kin, is built on the Ethereum blockchain technology like the most famous digital currency bitcoin. Kik founder and CEO Ted Livingston said that Kik will become the first social media application to publicly sell digital currency.

Kin is a cryptocurrency used for microtransactions in consumer applications. Millions of people earn and spend Kin across an ecosystem of 50+ apps, making it the most used cryptocurrency by mainstream consumers. Developers can add Kin to existing consumer applications with just a few lines of code, instantly unlocking new revenue models. Developers are paid through the Kin reward engine, which is similar to Bitcoin block rewards, but it pays developers for its users to earn and spend Kin. Apps that integrate Kin include social apps, content platforms, and games. Users spend Kin on content, tip creators, and buy in-game items, and earn Kin by watching ads or filling out surveys. Kin is a growing mini-economy in the digital world where everyone is paid fairly for their contributions.

1. Project introduction

Kik is launching an open-source cryptographic token called Kin, which is expected to be used as a universal cryptocurrency for everyday digital services such as chat, social media and payments. Kin will be the unit of all economic transactions within the Kin ecosystem and will serve as the basis for interoperability with other digital services.

Kin is essentially a pure cryptocurrency with a fixed supply. It is finely split and long-term inflation-free. However, as discussed below, only a small portion of the Kin supply will enter circulation in the near future, as the majority of the Kin supply is reserved for the Kin rewards engine. Like other cryptocurrencies, units of Kin are fungible, transferable, and are expected to be traded on cryptocurrency exchanges.

Project Features

Kin will be implemented as an ERC20 token on the public Ethereum blockchain. The Ethereum blockchain is currently the industry standard for issuing custom digital assets and smart contracts. The ERC20 token interface allows the deployment of standard tokens compatible with the existing infrastructure of the Ethereum ecosystem such as development tools, wallets and exchanges. Ethereum is capable of deploying fully Turing-machine-like trustless smart contracts, which can provide complex issuance rules for cryptocurrencies, digital financial contracts, and automated incentive structures. These advanced features and active ecosystem make Ethereum a natural fit for Kin.

Application scenario

According to AppAnnie, Kik is one of the most popular chat software platforms in the world, ranking 7th among social networks like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, and has a tendency to be more popular than LinkedIn. Kik Interactive, Inc. was founded in 2009 by Ted Livingston and Chris Best, a classmate from the University of Waterloo. Today, Kik Interactive has 150 employees with offices in Waterloo, Canada, Toronto, New York City, and Tel Aviv, Israel.

Kik is unique in the market as a chat app, and it's primarily aimed at teens and young adults. With more than 15 million annual active users, 57% of Kik's active user base is in the 13-24 age group. About 64% of Kik users live in the United States. Kik users are highly engaged. More than 250 million messages are sent to Kik every day. On average, Kik users spend 37 minutes on the platform and send 55 messages per day. In addition to chatting, Kik maintains the industry-leading bot platform: more than 187,000 bots have been created by third-party developers.

The size of the user base, demographics and social context make Kik a unique venue where a large mainstream audience can introduce, adopt and use cryptocurrencies. Past experience with “Kik Points” has shown that Kik users are receptive to digital currencies.

"Kik Points" Experiment
"Kik Points" were introduced as an experiment with a tradable unit of account within the Kik app. The project was concluded at the end of 2016 in order to prepare a more advanced solution that goes beyond purely advertising-based use cases. However, Kik was then able to gauge demand through transactions in the communication environment and gain valuable insights into user behavior. During the 2.5-year period between 2014 and 2016, Kik users completed 253 million bids and spent earned points on 74 million transactions.

As a result of the "Kik Dots" experiment, Kik learned that there is a large audience within the messaging app for an economy built around chat. It also became clear how to successfully tailor such an economic form to Kik's user base. While the typical cryptocurrency experience is virtually inaccessible to the average consumer today, the “Kik point” shows that users don’t need to be technically versed to use digital currencies. For Kik, Project Kin is an opportunity to combine chat with real digital commerce within its existing user base.

Integrating Kin in Kik
The "Kik Points" experiment shows that there is a chat-based economic need. Over time, Kik will work to integrate Kin into Kik's chat ecosystem for the benefit of users, platform developers and partners. The same process of iterative research, experimentation, and fine-tuning that has made Kik successful will be employed again by Kik to achieve the above goals. The Kik team has a proven track record in developing products for the mass market; Kik looks forward to introducing cryptocurrency into the product process. The following sections describe some possible use cases related to storing, earning and spending cryptocurrencies that Kik will explore and verify.

Currency to Earn
One of the most compelling features of Kik Points is that there are no purchases required by the user. Instead, millions of mainstreamers earn “Kik Points” simply by performing valuable actions. As Kik expands its economy to include a cryptocurrency with real value both inside and outside the chat app, the economic possibilities for users are greatly enhanced. In this way, attention, curation, and creation can be translated into real-world value by simply owning a smartphone.

Kin Wallet
The main function required to enable digital communities to use cryptocurrencies is a wallet. As a first step, Kik will integrate wallets for each Kik user account. An associated user interface will allow for the most common wallet interactions. By integrating the wallet to support Kik's millions of active users, Kin Wallet has the potential to become the most popular and used cryptocurrency wallet in the world.

Ethereum Settlement Layer
Users wishing to transfer Kin to and from the Kik app will be able to do so by interacting with the public Ethereum network, which will serve as a decentralized settlement layer for the currency. Users interacting with Kin inside Kik will have a more curated experience. This will allow early versions of the system to address blockchain scalability bottlenecks, free transactions, faster transaction times, and encapsulation of complex functions such as private keys. Over time, Kin will evolve with blockchain technology to provide these functions in a fully decentralized environment.

The Kik Economy and Possible Use Cases
Kik will launch several marketplace use cases enabling consumers and brands to transact with Kin. Through experimentation, Kik plans to create unique two-sided marketplace applications for users and iterate on the product. On the supply side, bots or content creators will create unique experiences. On the demand side, users will consume such products or services. In the near future, Kik's bots will have the ability to build their own business models.

Two. Comments

Since 2011, Kik's vision has been to build the next powerful communication platform. The company has already achieved something in chat, but now hopes that its achievements will promote a new ecosystem of decentralized digital services for everyday life. The ecosystem centers on a new cryptocurrency that will put users first while being open and ongoing.

Kik will create a new economic model for digital services, selling attention and data to consumers rather than to advertisers. In doing so, the company believes the world will take a big step toward unbundling the centralized capabilities of today's largest companies in the technology industry. In this new order, Kik plans to be one of many players, not an occupant. In order to promote a dynamic economy based on the Kin cryptocurrency, the company will pledge all its resources to make Kin the main transaction currency for its chat application and promote the services of the Kin ecosystem to its millions of users. It will establish the Kin Foundation to manage and encourage the development of the Kin ecosystem, and will create a Kin reward engine to incentivize developers and creators to create new products and services. Building on the success of "Kik Points", Kik has identified some initial use cases for new economic experiences in the chat environment.

The Kin cryptocurrency will be built on the Ethereum blockchain, initially using a hybrid on-chain and off-chain technology solution, with the goal of eventually transitioning to a fully decentralized, autonomous system. This cryptocurrency will be used to provide rewards to ecosystem partners based on each service's contribution to the overall development of Kin. The Kin Foundation will allow cryptocurrencies to be platform agnostic, but Kik will leverage its large existing user base to drive mass adoption. As a result, Kin can scale to meet the interoperability needs of modern applications and become the basis for a new form of monetization.

Through this vision, Kin will bring to fruition a new era of decentralized governance community ownership, enabling a vibrant ecosystem of digital services that power everyday life.

Related links:
https://kinecosystem.org/
http://www.qukuaiwang.com.cn/szhb/2688.html###
https://www.chainnews.com/articles/151787557127.htm