- What is KIN Money?
- How Kik Works
- Rewarding Creators Straight
- ICO
- Launch on Kik
- Moving to Stellar & Dual Chain Compatibility
- Kin Foundation
- KIN Trading History
- Where to Buy KIN
- How to Store KIN
- Conclusion
- Additional Resources
What is KIN Coin?
The Canadian social media company, Kik, made waves terminal year when they appear they wouldn’t exist pursuing another round of venture capital. Instead, they executed an ICO that raised $98 1000000 and put Kik on the map every bit a leading voice in bearding, decentralized social media. The result of that ICO, Kin Coin, saw a massive fasten in interest in Jan when the markets were flight loftier. Since and so, its value has leveled off, but at a college level than prior to the fasten.
The idea backside KIN is assuasive content creators and consumers to transact direct instead of relying on advertizement revenue to monetize content cosmos. KIN has been in development since the successful ICO. It’south an ERC-20 token currently merely plans to integrate the token into the Kik app later on this year will involve diminutive swaps with an analogous Stellar token for scalability.
This article has everything you need to know about Kin Coin. We’ll cover the background, including more information about Kik for those unfamiliar. We’ll besides look at the roadmap and trading history for the token. Let’south dig in.
How Kik Works
To sympathize the context for Kin Money’due south launch, it’s helpful to look at Kik, the social media visitor launching Kin Coin. Kik’s motivations for launching the coin are role philosophical, part fiscal, and probably part marketing ploy.
Kik is an app and social media platform that has over 15 million monthly users. Its user demographic skews younger. Most users are betwixt the ages of xiii-24. According to 2017 research from Kik, 33% of U.Due south. teenagers utilise Kik Messenger.
When y’all apply Kik, yous can send letters to your friends. However, you can besides share videos, sketches, spider web pages, sound files, and other media. Major brands likewise have Kik profiles you tin can interact with and at that place are over twenty,000 chatbots that tin can brand jokes, society pizza, or share the latest glory news.
The biggest selling point for Kik is anonymity. You don’t need to verify your identity or phone number in society to use the service. You just need to provide an electronic mail address and a name to sign up. Privacy advocates take praised this pick as a decision against monetizing user information. Social media giants are known to hoard information nearly users, and Kik is largely defying that trend. Kik doesn’t retain whatever account data and messages/media between Kik users go deleted from the visitor’south servers afterwards they’re sent.
Withal, Kik has besides come under fire for identity verification and security. Since Kik caters to teens, critics worry almost the protections in place to baby-sit minors against unwanted content or outright fraud/abuse. Kik believes its users are smart enough to know what to do on the platform, and it largely refuses to cede anonymity and privacy for the sake of security.
Rewarding Creators Straight
Kik’s latest effort has been allowing users to reward creators directly. Today’s digital content and social media companies monetize their websites using advertising. This model requires that these companies get after economies of scale, adding new users quickly. They besides desire new users to spend as much time as possible on their platform so they can maximize ad views and therefore acquirement.
The leadership at Kik believes this trend toward the attention economy is a error. Their philosophical argument for creating a cryptocurrency is that advertizement and attention seeking is cheapening the content ecosystem and our relationships. Using Kin Coin, they promise to enable consumers to pay creators and developers directly. This crowdsourced patronage is an important trend in social media. We’re seeing similar projects that accept gained traction with the likes of Kickstarter or Patreon. These services allow people to pay creators directly, without the demand for advertisers.
Kin Money takes it a pace farther by integrating the payment directly into the platform. You’ll be able to buy or support the creators of written content,
fine art
, video, games, chatbots, and
digital collectibles
all within the app. In this way, Kin Coin makes Kik similar to
Steem
. The difference is Kik has an existing audience and is home to all kinds of multimedia content.
Before launching Kin Money, Kik tested whether users would actually transact in tokens. From 2014 to 2016, they ran a test with Kik points. These were internal tokens, not backed by a blockchain and untradable outside the app. Still, at the outset of the experiment, over 300,000 Kik points transactions took place per day. By the end of the experiment, that number had climbed to ii million. There’south clearly a market for tokenization and rewarding creators direct.
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ICO
Kik needed further funding in 2017. Instead of raising money from venture capitalists, they decided to launch an ICO to create the token backside their new rewards points system.
The token sale for Kin Coin was a success, raising $98 one thousand thousand in September 2017. The sale included over 10,000 people from 117 countries. Unfortunately, Canadian citizens were non allowed to participate, and Kik is a Canadian visitor. Some argue this dampened demand and contributed to the ICO not reaching its hard cap of $110 1000000.
A full of 10 trillion KIN volition exist, of which 750 billion are currently in apportionment. The token launched on
Ethereum
.
Launch on Kik
Kin Coin volition launch on Kik later this year. The thought is for monetization to integrate seamlessly into the app. Users should be able to reward creators simply from their wallets with a few taps. Kin Coin is designed to be mobile-first, and a wallet app volition go far in the coming months likewise.
A few test users can use Kin Coin right at present on Kik. The only thing yous can practise and then far is buy some custom digital stickers for use in chats. Look more features upon launch later this year.
Over time, the idea is to allow other digital services and media applications to also integrate KIN. It won’t exist exclusive to Kik. However, Kik will be the first visitor to launch Kin Coin integration.
Moving to Stellar & Dual Concatenation Compatibility
Kin’south developers have expressed misgivings almost Ethereum’s scalability for the number of transactions they anticipate on Kin. Kin would demand well over the 10k transactions/solar day limit that Ethereum imposed to avoid network slowdowns. In response to the transaction limit, the developers initially considered moving the whole project over to
Stellar
. However, the liquidity of ERC-20 tokens is hard to find elsewhere.
The result is a hybrid organisation where Ethereum provides liquidity while Stellar handles transactions. When you buy KIN, you’ll be purchasing an ERC-twenty token. Nevertheless, that token will exist linked to a Stellar token equally well. When yous desire to transact using the Stellar token,
diminutive swaps
will lock the Ethereum token then it can’t be used. In the same way, when you sell the Ethereum token, atomic swaps will lock the Stellar token for its new owner.
Kin Foundation
The Kin Foundation exists contained of Kik. It aims to be the nonprofit advocacy arm for open tools for digital communication. Eventually, the goal is for Kin to serve equally a currency for a whole ecosystem of communication tools, non but Kik.
There’southward not a lot of information on the Foundation’s website virtually who is running it or how governance works. Over fourth dimension, we’ll see if the Kin Foundation differentiates itself from Kik or just serves as a puppet for Kik’south broader goals.
KIN Trading History
KIN’south value decreased following the ICO as hype died down. In January, KIN rode the wave forth with much of the cryptocurrency market to an all-time loftier. Since January, the cost has fallen, merely never to pre-Jan levels.
Where to Buy KIN
You can earn KIN for doing tasks on Kik or creating content once the integration is live later this yr.
To buy it now, you’ll need to visit an exchange.
Bancor
, EtherDelta, Mercatox, HitBTC, and
IDEX
are your top options.
How to Store KIN
KIN is an ERC-20 token, then you lot tin store information technology anywhere that accepts Ethereum.
MyEtherWallet
is a good choice for paper storage. Of grade, a
Ledger Nano S
hardware wallet is the aureate standard for security.
Conclusion
Kin has the backing of a major startup with a large active user base. This is an interesting opportunity to meet how well crypto integrates with an existing customs, especially a younger community who might non intendance well-nigh crypto. They simply want things to work well. Solving the problem of giving crypto a great user experience is an important stride to making crypto useful. If Kik tin figure that out with the Kin Money then this will be an interesting project to follow.
Additional Resources
Official Website
Foundation Website
Whitepaper
Subreddit
Github
Block Explorer
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Source: https://coincentral.com/kiks-kin-coin-rethinking-the-attention-economy/