Kinit app — Kin killer feature

Buying Kin bundles

With the enormous reach that the Kik messenger app has, it is easy to see that once the Kin Spend & Earn Concept (let’s not abbreviate that to SEC!) is gradually being rolled out, the number of Kin transactions on the Kin Stellar blockchain will skyrocket.

Photo by Bill Jelen on Unsplash

Whilst this is great from an end-user engagement perspective and buy-in into the Kin ecosystem, it will not drive direct value to the price of the still separate Kin1 ERC-20 token, apart from the very much subtle, unpredictable indirect value appreciation (Stellar Kin2 doing well -> investors buy more Kin1).

We know that the initial Kik integration will be a completely isolated Kin2 ecosystem. Designed to gradually ramp up on the resilience and capacity of the in-app transaction demands on the Kin Stellar blockchain. This will undoubtedly be rolled out in a canary release style fashion, ramping up the percentage of users that have access to the new Earn & Spend functionality all the while, whilst monitoring how the underlying infrastructure is coping with the ever increasing demand that this extra load puts on the system.

The Kinit app on the other hand will be a standalone wallet with Spend & Earn opportunities outside of Kik. This means Kin2 Kin Stellar tokens earned in the Kinit app will be able to be swapped to ERC-20 tokens and vice-versa.

Leaving the obvious identity management and wallet management issues aside for now, this means you can also swap your ERC-20 Kin1 tokens for in-app Kin2 tokens to be used to spend in the Kinit app.

Activity of swapping Kin1 to Kin2 in app would register as a plus-volume transaction on the Kin1 ERC-20 blockchain, thus adding value according to Metcalfe’s law. Equally, swapping Kin2 to Kin1 would have a similar effect.

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

All this Earn & Spend is great for the average user that hasn’t been initiated into the mysterious world of crypto — the irony of the meaning of the word won’t be lost on some of you. However, what if you are an impatient user and don’t want to grind through endless surveys and mini quizzes to fill your boots with Kin loot and without having to go through exchanges? What can you do? How could you add value to the Kin ecosystem? In particular, the Kin1 ecosystem?

How about you buy a bundle of 1000 Kin for fiat inside the Kinit app, either as an in-app purchase (so the various app stores get their cut) — or outside of the app. This transaction could be settled on the ERC-20 blockchain, and with monetary/currency transactions like this, it’s quite acceptable to have a queueing mechanism in place whereby a 5 minute wait is fairly reasonable.

As soon as it is provisioned and completed on the ERC-20 blockchain, an automatic 1-for-1 swap could take place to make it available for spend in-app, serving a pure utility purpose.

This would ensure an easy way for users to buy bundles of Kin for classic currency. Of course, this conversion ratio is something that is subject to change, much like any currency conversion, but I am sure it can be managed frequently and properly.

It is fallacious to think that only Kin2 Earn & Spend will drive the ERC-20 token price up to dizzying heights. We will collectively need to do more than that.

Making it easy for users who are not familiar with crypto and not interested in KRE incentives means the Kin team needs to be creating the ability for those users to get hold of a bundle of spendable Kin2 easily without leaving the app, and at the same time add value to the Kin1 ERC-20 economy.

It’s a Kin-win-win.