KIN is the native token of the social media giant KiK. The token was designed to help content creators and consumers to deal with one another directly. No longer did they have to rely on advertising money to monetize their content creation.
The KIN Coin was launched by KiK, a social media company which was motivated to launch the coin as a philosophical and financial project. KiK is an app as well as social media platform with over a million and a half monthly users.
Through a series of economic and technological transitions, and based on Kin, Kik will work toward creating the first open and sustainable alternative ecosystem of digital services for our daily lives. Economic incentives at the core of this ecosystem will ensure that all participants – users, founders, and digital service partners – will ultimately benefit from this work.
The initial coin offering was hosted on September 12th, 2017. The token sale concluded on September 26th, 2017 resulting in $98 million raised from 10,026 individuals across 117 countries. It was initially implemented on the Ethereum blockchain as an ERC20 token.
The Kin Ecosystem is envisioned as a community of ecosystem partners – digital services and applications – that adopt the Kin cryptocurrency. The Kin Foundation is intended as an independent, nonprofit, and democratic governance body for the members of this ecosystem. The principal functions of the Kin Foundation will include the open governance of its resources together with other ecosystem partners; the support and advancement of the technology related to Kin’s implementation; and all matters related to ecosystem membership, including the Kin Rewards Engine. 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. As time goes by it is likely that the foundation will be replaced by other, more innovative governance methods such as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).8 However, creating a formal legal body is an important first step in this process. To fulfill its mission, the Kin Foundation will dedicate resources to three specific goals related to research, development, and governance as described below.
Kik has moved to allow their users to reward content creators directly as an alternative to using advertising, which is the model used by nearly every social media platform. This advertising model requires social media companies to increase their user base as rapidly as possible and to grow their user base as large as possible. It also forces them to take steps that keep users on the site as long as possible, since this maximizes ad views and revenues.
Kik even tested the concept of whether their users would use coins for transactions before launching the KIN coin. Beginning in 2014 they ran a 2-year long test with Kik points, which were internal tokens not backed by a blockchain. Even so, they found over 300,000 Kik point transactions per day taking place right from the start. By the end of the two year test period, there were 2 million Kik point transactions happening per day.
Over time, Kik will work to integrate Kin into Kik’s chat ecosystem for the benefit of users, platform developers, and partners. Kik will do so by employing the same iterative process of research, experimentation, and fine-tuning that has made Kik successful. Kik’s team has a proven track record in developing products for the mass market, and Kik looks forward to introducing cryptocurrency into the production process. The sections below describe some prospective use cases related to storing, earning, and spending cryptocurrency that Kik will explore and validate.
Kik is introducing an open-source cryptographic token, named Kin, which is envisioned as a general-purpose cryptocurrency for use in everyday digital services such as chat, social media, and payments. Kin will be the unit of account for all economic transactions within the Kin Ecosystem, and it will serve as the basis of interoperability with other digital services. In character, Kin is a pure cryptocurrency of fixed supply. It is fractionally divisible and long-term noninflationary. However, as described below, only a small portion of the Kin supply will become liquid in the near future, as most of the Kin supply is reserved for the Kin Rewards Engine. Like other cryptocurrencies, units of kin are fungible and transferable, and they will be expected to trade on cryptocurrency exchanges.Kin was initially implemented on the public Ethereum blockchain as an ERC20 token, but has initiated a swap to its own protocol. The token swap is currently online and is expiring at the beginning of 2020.
The Kin Rewards Engine will use economic incentives to bring other digital services and applications into the decentralized Kin Ecosystem. Inspired by previous systems like Bitcoin’s block rewards and Steemit’s posting rewards, the Rewards Engine will create natural incentives for digital service providers to adopt Kin and become partners in the ecosystem. The ecosystem will not impose any unnecessary restrictions or tolls on monetization strategies, beyond ensuring common ethics and legality of content and transactions. As more partners join, the network effect of the Kin Ecosystem will grow, building the value of the currency, and in turn encouraging new partners to join this initiative
The Ledger Nano S is currently the only hardware wallet to support the mainnet version of KIN. The wallet, obviously isn't free and may seem quite pricey for some individuals, but you can't put a price on the security it provides. The wallet can be used for many other cryptocurrencies in addition to KIN. As for using the Nano Ledger S, the first step towards setting up your device is unboxing you device and checking if you have received all the accessories with the device. Once you have unboxed your device, you need to configure it and initialize it before being able to use it. The process is quite simple and will hardly take about 20-30 minutes post which you will be all set to use your Ledger Nano S device. This video does a pretty good job at explaining how the setup works.
Trust Wallet is one of the most trustworthy wallets amongst the users, especially since the largest exchange in the world, Binance had acquired it last year in June. Trust wallet is even very updated and advanced with the latest technologies, which makes it effective for all kinds of users. Its also one of the few wallets that supports KIN's mainnet version.
Atomic Wallet is a decentralized wallet which is available for Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems, hence you don’t have to shift your operating systems. Atomic wallet is one of the first ones to upgrade its technology with the KIN mainnet update. What’s great about atomic wallet is also its in-built exchange, which allows you to quickly swap tokens while also having access to features like credit card purchases.
Guarda wallet is a multi-currency wallet that offers a non-custodial wallet to its users. The wallet is available for desktop, mobile, web and a chrome extension is available as well. The service also provides its users with multiple handy instruments for managing digital assets like a built-in crypto exchange and fiat purchasing for quite a few of the currencies it supports.
The only legit place where you can buy KIN with a credit card is Coinswitch.
Coinswitch is a middleman service that shows you the best rate among cryptocurrency exchanges and provides you with the possibility to buy at the lowest price. You need not worry about the legitimacy of those brokers/exchanges as Coinswitch only works with well established companies.
Also, Coinswitch is currently the service that operates the KIN's token switch from the Ethereum blockchain to the KIK's protocol, so that should add an additional layer of trust in the service.
As always, if you have some BTC laying around, you could always use it to buy KIN on an exchange like HitBTC or Binance
