The recent downturn in alt prices is a Darwin-esque development. Therefore, the weaker projects and the scam projects are sliding down the coinmarketcap rankings or have lapsed into activity. The adoption rate for a lot of Ethereum dependant dapps has been very low. This development has cost a lot of passive investors a lot of money. That ICO that seemed ‘too good to be true’ last December most likely has turned out to be just that. However, where there is failure there is also opportunity which brings us to a project called KIN.

KIN & KIK – An adoption ready blockchain project

KIN is a product of the team who developed and run the KIK messenger platform. KIK is similar to Viber and WhatsApp but has some additional functions that differentiate it. The KIK target market is teens and young adults. It has an internal browser, encouraging users to spend more time within the app.

KIK’s functionality is as follows;

One to one chatting

Send messages, videos, pictures, gifs, etc.

Group chat (with up to 49 other users)

Anonymous chat

Promoted Chats allow users to follow and chat with different brands in music, entertainment

In summary KIK is a messaging platform with aspirations to be a social interaction platform where users can discover content and interact with each other. The KIK team trialled a KIK points system within the app. This points system behaved like a cryptocurrency might but without the backend architecture and full benefits. Most notably, this adoption trial was overwhelmingly successful with over 2 million daily active users making use of the trial tokens.

KIN Ecosystem

This brings us to KIN. KIN is a cryptocurrency based economy system that KIK are building. KIN is well developed. The KIN ecosystem has 4 notable milestones.

Create the Kin cryptocurrency on Ethereum:

The KIN token is a general-purpose cryptocurrency for daily use in our digital lives. Kin will be used for all transactions in the Kin ecosystem. It was originally intended to be implemented on the public Ethereum Blockchain as an ERC20 token. Considering scalability issues on the Ethereum blockchain, KIN has decided to move their project to the Stellar blockchain.

Crypto enthusiasts reacted strongly to this development. At least one significant investor requested a refund. Citing the whitepaper’s devotion to Ethereum and lack of provision for the announced development move. It is fair to say a lot of the criticism comes from the Ethereum community seeing a promising project moving elsewhere rather than genuine critique of the project. The KIN token trades at $0.00012. The huge supply of tokens is viewed by the project as a requirement if the ecosystem is to handle high volumes of micro transactions.

Integrate Kin into Kik

Kin will be adopted as the transaction currency inside of the Kik app. With millions of monthly active users, Kik will drive mainstream consumer adoption of Kin, establishing demand and fundamental value for the cryptocurrency. By natively integrating the Kin wallet into the app, it will instantly become one of the most adopted and used cryptocurrencies in the world. The initial applications of the KIN currency within the KIK app will be simple and functional. The ability to gift or donate like TRON has done with the Seedit twitter integration. Users will be able to sell digital items to each other in exchange for KIN. Content generators can charge KIN to content viewers.

Develop the Kin Rewards Engine

The rewards engine is an innovative crypto economic structure which will promote the use of Kin as a common currency. Kin will be introduced into circulation as a daily reward, which will be distributed among stakeholders by an algorithm that reflects each community’s contribution to the overall ecosystem. This economic structure will create a natural incentive for owners of other digital services to adopt Kin and become partners in the Kin ecosystem. Over time, the Kin Rewards Engine will be implemented as a fully decentralized system based on smart contract technology.

This is quite like Basic Attention Token. KIN are seeking to reward users for content engagement and reward publishers for producing quality content. The goal is that smart contract technology can replace the function of centralised advertising behemoths like Facebook and Alphabet. Therefore, liberating those huge profits and distributing them equally among users of the KIN ecosystem. Where BAT has to grow the Brave browser, KIN has its platform ready.

Launch the Kin Foundation

The KIN Foundation is a non-profit governance body for the Kin Ecosystem. Therefore, its mandate is to grow an open ecosystem of digital services (dApps). While giving developers an open and sustainable platform to develop, enhance and monetize those services.

In July 2018 the KIN foundation announced it’s first developer incentive programme. The programme has a war chest of $3 million to distribute amongst 40 developers. The capital is for the development of consumer friendly dapps for the KIN ecosystem. Each team will receive ample funding to develop and market their dapp. KIN is hyper aware of the importance of adoption. Applicants have until October 2nd to create and deploy a consumer app using Kin’s proprietary SDK. Therefore, this is a date worth marking in your diary!

Investment potential of KIN

KIN is available on Bancor Network and IDEX exchanges among others. It remains unlisted on A grade exchanges due to it’s huge supply. The large pool of KIK users makes this project appealing. It does not seem like many projects have a network like this.

Hodlers say – “It’s a well-developed project with a successful team. They have a large adoption ready pool of users on KIK who’ve already road tested the idea successfully.”

Haters say – “ This project is moving from ether to stellar mid development. They never mentioned Stellar in their whitepaper, can we trust these guys to execute the rest of their roadmap as described in the whitepaper?”

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