Kik is a massive social media chat platform. Their iOS and Android application hovers around 5 – 7th place in the U.S app store. This social media giant is creating an ERC-20 token, called Kin, that will radically change how the platform is monetised and how users can exchange value on Kik.
There aren’t many altcoins that can claim a platform that already has millions of users who send over a quarter of a billion messages daily.
In their whitepaper the Kin foundation says “ Today, we are witnessing the next evolutionary leap: the assimilation of economic value into communication systems. Digital services such as chat, social media, and online payments have come to play a fundamental role in our daily lives, influencing not only our consumption behaviours, but also our discourse, politics, and methods of value exchange. Our digital communications platforms are becoming the most important media in the ongoing development of a global economy.”
Kin is trying to be a part of our next evolutionary leap, and they are creating a suite of blockchain tools to do so. Social media tipping for good content, bidding for a spot in a private group with an influencer or rewarding people for their user generated content are just three example use cases that Kin has demonstrated.
Kin is a pure cryptocurrency. Like Bitcoin, its primary use is to transfer wealth. The main difference is that Kin sends value around an ecosystem and not necessarily from wallet to wallet. On the platform, users will earn Kin by providing value to other members of the Kik digital community through curation, content creation, and commerce.
Kin users will be able to spend Kin on products, 6 services, and other valuable assets offered by merchants, developers, influencers, and other participants. Its resulting value will enable the launch of an economic incentive mechanism, the Kin Rewards Engine, to further grow the ecosystem.The Kin Rewards Engine is scheduled to release 60 percent of the supply over time at a rate of 20 percent of the remainder per annum and in perpetuity. Kin has fairly complex token mechanics.
It has a fixed supply of 10 Trillion, out of which: 60% will go to the Kin foundation and the Kik Rewards Engine. 10% will be sold in the token sale and 30% is pre-allocated to Kik which is released and distributed at a rate of 10 percent per quarter, for 10 quarters. There is a massive total supply of tokens but only a fraction of these tokens are liquid in the market. The Kin Rewards Engine is used to reward projects like bots, companies or people who contribute to the Kik ecosystem. The actual Kin token will be implemented on the public Ethereum blockchain as an ERC20 token. The team are also using Ethereum smart contracts to put 60% of Kin’s total supply into escrow. Like all other ERC20 tokens, it is limited by Ethereum’s current inability to scale and blockchain congestion. Casper, Sharding, Plasma and Raiden are just some of the proposed updates to the Ethereum network that will fix its slow throughput.
The current internet is monetized through attention. Your likes, clicks and impressions are a commodity, and to a company they have a dollar value. Social media was the natural progression. People were given an online space and identity on the internet. This increased the value of our attention 10 fold. Content is shared online and it has an organic reach. We have viral content, YouTube channels, branded Facebook pages, influencers worth millions, and it has become one of the largest industries on the planet.
Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and CEO Social Capital explained in an amazing interview how social media algorithms and the monetization of attention has resulted in an echo chamber effect. What you see on Facebook is decided by algorithms that spread content which the most people react the most strongly to. This is rarely a nuanced opinion, because that’s not how people think. We love to label and group things right and wrong, conservative and liberal, for or against.
It goes deeper than just grouping opinions togther. Social justice writing is a legitimate and highly sort after skill. If you go to any freelancing site and search for Donald Trump, Brexit, gay marriage referendums, transgender bathroom debates and you will see job offerings to write batches of articles for and against contentious social issues. Why? This is easily shareable content that quickly reinforces how we feel about issues.
People care about these things, sure, but there is an economic incentive for entire industries to feed of angry reacts and thumbs up. The Kin Whitepaper is quoted saying ”In a decentralized networks, both economic value and governance are distributed among the network’s stakeholders rather than concentrated in a single and centralized organization. The stakeholders are its founders, investors, supporters, custodians, operators and, most importantly, its consumers. In these systems, economic value created by the decentralized organization is distributed among all participants, ensuring that the users who create it are compensated for their efforts.”
The Kin Foundation is an independent, nonprofit, and democratic governance body for the members of the Kin ecosystem. Its goal is to develop and fund this social media ecosystem’s platform of blockchain tools and manage the Kin Rewards Engine.
Considering how public and established this company is, I think this team is more than trustworthy. Any kind of malicious action are disincentivized by the damage it would cause to their reputation and the inevitable class action lawsuit that would follow.
The Kin Foundation’s mandate is to grow an open ecosystem of digital services that consumers can easily explore and find value in, while giving developers an open and sustainable platform to develop, deliver, and enhance those services and attract users. Ted Livingston is the founder of the Kik mobile app, and by extension the Kin cryptocurrency.
You can trace his interest in blockchain back for years if you follow his online persona. He comes from an IT and engineering background has proven his corporate experience by founding one of the most successful social media platforms, and he is quickly joining the ranks of prominent cryptocurrency authorities through clever use of Medium and frequent Q&A sessions on YouTube.
There is also a Kin ecosystem team who are more involved with the ERC-20 token’s development and building the ecosystem of functionality that it will interact with on the Kik app.
The biggest thing that Kin has going for it is that it’s an ERC-20 token linked to a massive social media platform. Kik has already tested an in game currency that rewarded users for watching advertisements, and it’s volumes exceeded Bitcoin trading volumes. “Key to this innovation was the notion that users would not have to purchase Kik Points but could instead earn them within the app. Millions of Kik users participated, resulting in an average monthly transaction volume nearly three times higher than the global transaction volume of Bitcoin.”
The team are planning to do something similar with a volatile cryptocurrency and expand earning capabilities from watching advertisement to actively participating in the network.
Find out how to buy KIN.