The Kin Rewards Engine

When we first released our white paper, we stated that 60 percent of Kin tokens would be held by the Kin Foundation, which will oversee the Kin Rewards Engine (KRE). Each year, the KRE will release 20 percent of the Kin Foundation’s remaining supply every year in perpetuity.

We were asked if the KRE and its inflation model would need to be redesigned. Along the way, we’ve realized that our original plan would give out 1.2 trillion KIN in the first year, which would effectively double the circulating supply of Kin. In order to maximize the growth of the economy and the demand on Kin, we need to think carefully about how we can effectively give out that Kin, along with how much, and at what rate, we should release it.

“Putting supply into the Kin economy in a very thoughtful way is one of the most important things that we need to do. The critical innovation of blockchains is the ability to programmatically guarantee the scarcity of a digital asset and also guarantee the rate at which that asset comes into the circulating supply […] The KRE is a complicated piece of software, and it will be an iterative one.”

How Kin unlocks better experiences in Kik

Last month, Kin was integrated into Kik to unlock new earn and spend opportunities in the app. At launch, Kin was available to 1,000 users on Kik, and we have since been able to ramp up the integration to over 4,000 users. We will continue to scale this integration to Kik’s remaining user base in the coming weeks. Next, we’ll work to expand the offerings that Kin makes available to Kik’s users, including features that we ourselves create and those created by our users, for our users.

“We introduced Kin because Kik needed a new way to monetize. As we have been integrating Kin into Kik, we realized that there’s something more - something much better. Kin not only represents a fundamentally new way for Kik to monetize, but Kin also represents a fundamentally new tool to build a community.”

Additionally, in our white paper we stated that we expect Kik to be the largest player in the Kin Ecosystem. On this, Ted highlighted that we’re envisioning Kin to be a way for developers of all sizes to band together as one to compete against monopolies like Facebook.

“We don’t expect Kik to be the largest player in the ecosystem. On day one, Kik will be the largest player in the ecosystem because it’s the first player. For a while it will probably remain this way, but over time we expect more and more developers to band together […] to the point where all developers come together to compete as one and to win as one with Kin.”

Creating demand for Kin 1 and Kin 2

There have been a lot of questions in the community lately about drivers of demand for Kin1 (our ERC20 token running on Ethereum for liquidity) and Kin2 (our consumer token running on our blockchain fork of Stellar). Right now Kin1 and Kin2 are only different because they run on different blockchains.

We’re developing an atomic swap bridge that will connect both coins on our Kin Blockchain, which will allow Kin holders to lock their tokens on one blockchain in order to unlock them on the other. Kin1 will equal Kin2. But how will demand for Kin be created? Ted outlined three drivers: