A key piece of the Kin mission is rewarding the digital contributors who make communities stronger. This week, we took that mission IRL.

Our first Kin Ambassadors event brought 28 top contributors from the Kin community together in NYC. We flew attendees in from 13 different countries to hear from leaders across our organization — spanning product, partnerships, engineering, and community teams — about our progress and roadmap. (With a few special guest speakers, too.)

Why host an Ambassadors Event? Because the strength of our community is crucial to the strength of our ecosystem. We sought to:

Meet and engage with power users (to learn from each other)

Empower attendees with insights from across our organization

Activate leadership and forge bonds inside and across the community

Express our thanks and reward their contribution as power users

Help them help us realize the Kin vision

With nearly 9,200 readers in our Kin Foundation Subreddit, narrowing down our attendee list to ~30 wasn’t easy. So how did we choose?

As Ted Livingston told the room on Day 1, we picked the people who understand how Kin will facilitate a new digital services economy.

“Kin is different from every other cryptocurrency out there. So we looked into our community and said, ‘Who gets it? Who understands what’s unique and different about Kin?’ And that’s all of you in this room. You understand what it is we’re actually building, and you want to help us win together.”

Ted Livingston was interviewed by reporter Brady Dale of CoinDesk in the kickoff fireside chat.

As our attendees learned over two days, winning together will take a lot of work.

Ted and our team leaders reinforced that to make Kin the most used cryptocurrency, we need several things first: A fully scalable blockchain; a 5 minute SDK; and a completed integration into a major consumer application to spark mainstream adoption.

Each of those components is deep in progress. Our attendees got an in-depth look at where they all stand, and which pieces prospective partners find most compelling.

The takeaway: Even now — at the very beginnings of the Kin journey — our efforts put us miles ahead of many crypto projects.

Feedback from The_Kenich on reddit.com/r/KinFoundation

When it comes to full-scale integration, for example, our attendees got a peek at how Kin will support new features inside the Kik app (such as personalization and group chat themes) and learned how our organizations are working together to test blockchain scalability.

Laura Newton, product manager at Kik

In fact, this was one of the first chances we’ve had to share how Kin will ultimately make Kik stronger. By empowering creators to meet the demands of their audiences, Kik will better equip its users for success in the digital economy.

“Kik is a digital service, that faces the same monetization challenges as other digital services. So we have a role to play in jumpstarting the ecosystem,” said Mike Roberts, VP of product and engineering at Kik. “We look at Kin and say, ‘How can we use this to solve our users’ problems?’ and also ‘How can we use this to solve our company’s problems?’”

We brought an investors’ perspective to the table, too.

In an interview with Jake Brukhman of Coinfund, legendary VC and Kik board member Fred Wilson shared his thoughts on the ecosystem we’re building. (He also said he sees the gaming and virtual goods markets as perhaps “the first good ones” for blockchain experiences.)

The sessions discussed above were just a few of many. The event also included insights into the product, KRE, and more. (Watch out for recaps and video in coming weeks.)

At the close of Day 2, we challenged our community members to put their knowledge to work. We finished out the event with a working session to cultivate new ideas on how to take our mission further and mobilize our power users to action.

We look forward to using their insights to build a true ‘Ambassadors Program’ that harnesses our attendees’ enthusiasm into advocacy.

And we can’t wait. As we grow, we hope our valued community members will continue to make our community stronger and better.

It was our pleasure to host our ambassadors this week and forge new bonds across our company and Kin holders. But two days of engagement at a SoHo venue — and offsite bowling, too — was just the beginning.

“We handpicked you to be here because you represent the culture we’d like to see take off globally,” said Ted Livingston. “You’re our partners on this journey as we work to make that happen.”

Community attendees and the #KinNYC team. Saaaaay “Kin!”

Stay tuned. More recaps, videos, and takeaways from KinNYC to come— including deep dives into partner strategy and the latest on the KRE !