WATERLOO - When Kik Interactive announced a public sale for its new Kin cryptocurrency, a veritable United Nations' worth of potential customers preregistered.

About 17,000 people from 139 countries signed up, leaving chief executive officer Ted Livingston and his team at the Waterloo-based instant messaging company to vet all kinds of passports.

Nearly 10,000 people from 117 countries followed through with purchases during the ongoing token sale.

"There's tons of excitement all around the world," Livingston told an audience Friday at the Waterloo Innovation Summit.

There's just one problem - Canadians may share in that excitement, but they can't buy the tokens right now.

Because of what Livingston has previously described as "weak guidance" from the Ontario Securities Commission on the cryptocurrency's definition under securities law, Kik decided to leave Canada out of the sale.

China - which is in the midst of a clampdown on cryptocurrencies, sending the value of industry giants like bitcoin tumbling - was also excluded from the Kin sale.

Once the public sale is complete, anyone in the world - Canada and China included - will be able to purchase and trade Kin on the secondary market.

Livingston said he feels for regulators faced with policing emerging digital currencies.

"The regulators are in a very tough spot where on the one side, they want to allow and foster innovation, and on the other side, they want to protect the consumer," he said.

But he warned that a too-tentative approach could prove disastrous for those looking to adopt what he believes is a transformational business and funding model.

"We have this view where we're all nice to each other, but when somebody starts to actually innovate . 'Ooh, there's risk. Shut it down and figure it out'," Livingston said. "If Canada takes that view, we are going to miss this boat, again."

Livingston pointed out that Canada already lost its claim to Ethereum, the second-most valuable digital currency, when its creator, a University of Waterloo dropout named Vitalik Buterin, left the country.

On a list of once-in-a-decade innovations - the PC, the internet, the mobile phone - Livingston feels that cryptocurrencies occupy the next spot.

The Kin digital currency initially is designed to be used within the Kik platform, which has about 15 million regular monthly users among 300 million people registered. It will be used to buy digital products and services on Kik; users can also earn Kin within the app.

One of the things that makes a cryptocurrency like Kin unique is that there's a finite amount. As demand for it rises, so does its value.

Kik is only offering 10 per cent of the Kin tokens in the public sale that's expected to raise $125 million - more than the company has ever raised in venture capital. Sixty per cent will be held to issue as rewards or incentives to Kik users or developers who create new products for the platform. The company will retain the remaining 30 per cent.

"If you set some aside for yourself at the beginning, you can make a lot of money," Livingston said.

In 2015, Kik received its largest single investment - $50 million from China's Tencent, makers of the wildly-popular WeChat app. With about a billion users - and offering the ability to do everything from send messages to pay bills and purchase goods in stores while offering interest and loans - "they are eating the financial system in China," Livingston said.

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It's an innovative, disruptive approach that Livingston predicts other giants like Facebook will soon adopt. And he believes cryptocurrencies will play a key role in this brave new world.

Just as the dot-com era produced a lot of losing firms and a few world-changing ones like Google and Amazon, the same will be true of digital currencies, he said.

"A few huge currencies will come out of it. We obviously want Kin to be one of those currencies, and we think we have a unique advantage in making that happen."