Article content continued

Kin is a non-profit foundation that’s supposed to run the Kin cryptocurrency. The Kin foundation currently has only two people on its board: Livingston, and a second independent board member, but the Kin Foundation hasn’t publicly revealed who that second person is.

Livingston’s idea is to use Kik as a launchpad for Kin, allowing users on the messaging app to earn cryptocurrency tokens, spend them on in-app purchases, and eventually be able to do peer-to-peer transactions.

For example, an influential Kik user could charge other people a few Kin to join a group chat for exclusive content.

Kik and Kin also want to create a software development kit that will allow other apps to incorporate the cryptocurrency, and Newton said they’ve signed partnership agreements with the Unity game development engine to create a SDK to allow software developers to embed Kin into the architecture of their games.

Kin also has a partnership with IMVU, a social game where users interact with 3D avatars.

If all of this gets off the ground, there will ultimately be a total of 10 trillion Kin tokens in circulation. Of those tokens, 1 trillion were sold off to investors as part of the initial coin offering last year, raising nearly $100 million.

Kik is holding onto 3 trillion of these tokens, so if the currency really takes off, that’s how they’ll turn a profit on this project.

The remaining 6 trillion tokens are held by the Kin Foundation, and the foundation is supposed to develop a “Kin rewards engine” to dole out most of those tokens to developers who create useful and interesting integrations for Kin.

Livingston was fairly blunt about the stakes involved in this play when he spoke to the Financial Post in late May. This is a do-or-die bet for Kik.

He said they’re not big enough to make much money selling ads, and they can’t charge users for the messaging service directly, because there are other free options out there like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

“We’re playing against monopolies — Facebook and Google,” he said.

“We need a different way, or one day we’re going to get killed.”