The advent of bitcoin and the bevy of technical innovations that came with it have shown the potential to be genuinely disruptive. But while everyone has been arguing about block sizes and lightning networks, one project has been focused on building a digital economy: Kin.

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Kin is a cryptocurrency being developed by Kik, an established tech company with an app that has over 300M registered users worldwide. While Kin is commonly mistaken to merely be a cryptocurrency for use within the Kik app, recent developments have revealed a clarified vision that is much more ambitious.

Kik has been working behind the scenes to align developer and retailer interests in an attempt to create a real digital economy around Kin, in which users both earn and spend cryptocurrency everyday.

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Highly user-friendly, Kin is intended to make cryptocurrency accessible to regular people who aren’t experienced in the crypto space. Along with participating in this decentralized economy with other users by exchanging art, ideas, and whatever else you might imagine; inside the ecosystem, users can also spend Kin on top brands and services, or earn Kin by participating in experiences provided by developers and partners. These experiences include tasks such as voting in polls, playing games, or consuming media. All of this has been meticulously crafted to be as intuitive as possible.

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Designed from the ground up to actually be used as a currency, these earn and spend opportunities in marketplace applications like “Kinit” as well as integration with other services and platforms give Kin an intrinsic value that other cryptocurrencies are still struggling to attain. Their strategy for acquisition of ecosystem partners encompasses three over-arching categories: Platforms, Services, and Brands. One of the best fits for Kin is integration into communities where users engage in peer to peer exchanges, where it could provide a secure transaction layer for those communities. Most partnerships are still under wraps, but they’ve already announced a platform partner in Unity Technologies, who are working closely with Kin developers to provide a gaming SDK to video game developers who build using the Unity engine. They’ve also announced a brand partner in Blackhawk Network, who will be providing branded spend opportunities for the Kin marketplace such as top brand gift cards and even discounts. Considering the investment thesis of Kik’s VC firm, Union Square Ventures, involves backing companies that are built around thriving communities, their portfolio might be a good place to look for clues about potential future partners.

In order to achieve this ambitious vision and bring others on board, the developers at Kin have coded economic incentivization into the token distribution itself, via the new Kin Rewards Engine. By integrating Kin, developers are automatically rewarded a portion of newly distributed tokens in relation to their contributions to the network on a daily basis. This open source algorithm directly compensates developers for using Kin, providing an all-new monetization model that could be much more viable for smaller developers and companies than trying to compete directly with the advertising giants that dominate the web.

“Our goal as a whole is to provide a new monetization model where everyone involved can benefit; from users, brands, and digital services alike. This will be a model that compensates everyone fairly for their contributions.” — Why Kin is Building an Ecosystem

Two different SDK options provide developers with varying levels of implementation, depending on how deeply they will be integrated into the ecosystem. The “5 minute” Ecosystem SDK will allow developers to essentially drag-and-drop Kin earn and spend experiences, instantly adding basic functionality to their app. Within that kit, the Core SDK allows developers to to play with the blockchain “building blocks” behind the tech and build their own custom solution. The Core SDK is built on top of the Stellar network.

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Interoperating between two blockchains, Kin’s hybrid approach is meant to provide users with the fast transactions and scalability of the Stellar network for in-app use, but also the liquidity, decentralization, and software compatibility of the Ethereum network for things like exchanges and decentralized applications. They plan to move to a custom built blockchain on top of ORBS in the future. Consumer friendly but technically ambitious, Kik is working to make Kin the first cryptocurrency to achieve consumer scale adoption, to prove a blockchain capable of such adoption, and to be used every day as a currency because of it. Whether or not they can pull it off could very well be a trillion dollar question, but the team developing Kin has proven to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most professional and capable teams in the crypto space by a considerable margin.

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You can follow the Kin Foundation on Medium here :

https://medium.com/kinfoundation

You can also find articles from Kin contributors to Medium here:

https://medium.com/kin-contributors

You can join the Kin telegram here:

https://t.me/kinfoundation

You can find more information about Kin, including their whitepaper on the token and “KRE” (Kin Rewards Engine) here:

https://kinecosystem.org/