As you well know, Kin is a digital sharing economy of equal opportunities. An ideal world where millions of people are compensated for the talent they provide through their phones, and a world where developers get compensated for creating amazing places for consumers to provide value to each other. It would be a world where people win together by working together. It would be a digital world built on Kin.

We have the chance of making Kin the most used crypto token in the world. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Kin is destined to be used for value exchange, empowering individuals to take part in this evolving new economy.

Guiding principles

Today the barriers to entry into crypto are high, buying crypto is not easy and using it? Almost impossible. Our goal is to introduce Kin to as many users as possible.

There are a few key principles that guide us when we strive to achieve our vision:

Earning Kin — instead of introducing new users to crypto by only buying on exchanges, they will be able to receive their first KIN by investing some time and effort. This will allow many people to earn enough KIN to start using it immediately. This is a big shift in mentality, in order for Kin to operate as a currency, people will have to use it as a currency. Positioning Kin differently from other crypto tokens which people buy only for investment purposes. Easy to use — We believe in a seamless process that creates simple and easy to use products. Using crypto today is unbelievably complex. With Kin, this can be changed by designing beautiful and easy to use experiences. As Andreas M. Antonopoulos puts it: “We add complexity in the backend to remove complexity in the front end”. Creating network effect — Networks become valuable when they get to scale. Differently from other crypto tokens, KIN is going to be integrated into many digital platforms (Kik being the first one), putting it in the hands of millions of users. In this way, Kin can jumpstart the network by injecting financial utility that can be shared between all KIN holders — consumers, developers, brands & investors.

Our product building process

It’s the process that builds the best products.

We believe in learning. We are already learning a lot from Kin’s alpha release (spoiler: a post about it is in the works).

Our goal is to accelerate this learning. This means our product teams are organised as small and agile startups constantly working to create real value for real users. We optimise the Build > Measure > Learn loop, adopting the ‘lean startup’ methodology. Our focus in 2018 is going to be on 3 efforts:

Kin Ecosystem

Our goal for Q1 is to release an open-source SDK for integrating Kin into applications and enable partners to join in on the Kin ecosystem. This SDK must be easy to use in order for it to be adopted by 3rd-party entities such as stand-alone developers and digital platforms.

As developers integrate the Kin SDK, it automatically calculates how much KIN should be awarded to each user, and might provide a small daily airdrop for the most engaged users. It also registers as a blockchain transaction and as such, it will earn the developer a piece of the KRE (Kin Reward Engine).

Key elements for the SDK are: entry point for the wallet, earn / spend opportunities, messaging api, notifications, balance & basic transactions history and more.

The below mockups are very initial (not the real UX or design) — just a very basic starting point: