The Kin Foundation has begun rolling out its plans to build a cryptocurrency ecosystem to power its messenger platform, starting with a new tipping feature.

Kik Kickstarts Its Crypto Strategy with Kin Tipping

Kik, the popular messenger app for iPhone and Android, revealed today a new tipping feature that uses the company’s native Kin cryptocurrency token, reports The Next Web. The feature will be available today for a limited set of users, and will only be available on Android devices for the time being.

Kik is a widely used messenger app that connects users via individual and group chats. The company is also behind The Kin Foundation that created the Kin cryptocurrency token.

Kin started its life as an Ethereum-based ERC20 token, but the company eventually decided to fork Stellar to create its own blockchain. Now, Kin is finally ready for real world usage.

Related Reading: Kik Messenger Team Moves Away from ETH Blockchain

For now, Kin tipping will only allows users to tip the moderators and admins of public group chats, but Kik will eventually launch tipping for all of its 300 million users.

Kik’s head of product Laura Newton explained that “admin tipping incentivizes public group admins to foster enjoyable chat experiences on Kik, while giving group participants the opportunity to thank admins for maintaining these spaces in the app.”

As reported by Redditors, tips appear as a mid-chat alert, similar to the way users joining or exiting a chat is indicated. The value of the tip isn’t revealed, but tips are currently capped at 500 Kin, which is just a little more than a penny’s worth of the cryptocurrency.

The initial rollout is also limited to 1,000 public groups as the new feature is thoroughly tested. Those 1,000 public groups can have up to 50 users each chatting, potentially exposing the new tipping feature to as many as 50,000 Kik users.

“The introduction of this new peer-to-peer experience is a huge step forward in shaping Kik into the lighthouse example for new and existing participants in the Kin Ecosystem,” said Kik founder Ted Livingston about the newly launched feature.

More Kin-Related Developments in the Pipeline

The Kin Foundation announced a developer incentive program earlier this year, with the intention of luring developers to build new experiences that utilize the Kin cryptocurrency.

Related Reading: Kin Mentioned On Popular TV game Show Jeopardy

The program offered up to 25 select developers an aggregate total of $3M in a mix of fiat and Kin tokens for “successfully launching their own Kin economies” after six months of development. Phase 2 of the program comes to an end within a month, and the final phase of the program will close on April 1, 2019.

As the program winds down, developers will be ready to debut their new experiences that utilize the Kin cryptocurrency token.

Featured image from Shutterstock.