Kik Messenger, aka Kik, is an instant messaging mobile app with over 300 million users. It’s popular amongst teens, with a reported 40% of US teenagers using the app.
And it’s going crypto. The company intends to replace its Kik Points with a KIN cryptocurrency. But the project is much bigger than just adding crypto. From the whitepaper:
The reliance on advertising for digital media revenue has resulted in advantages for companies whose products reach mass audiences. Such companies can leverage network effects and economies of scale to apply intense pressure to smaller competitors while also stifling competition by providing their services free of charge. As a result, large companies enjoy the compounding interest of incumbency, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the few, often to the detriment of consumer privacy and user experience and almost always at the expense of new entrants to the sector.
Kik has always been unique in that it has not gone the traditional model of display advertising and selling user information. To that end it’s been experimenting with Kik Points since 2015.
Millions of users participated. And Kik’s average monthly transaction volume is many more times that of bitcoin. Check out the chart below.
With the introduction of the KIN token Kik also plans on developing the Kin ecosystem. The goal is to establish an economy around the new currency. KIN will be an ERC20 token.
The incentive mechanism to facilitate the ecosystem is the Kin Rewards Engine. It will use economic incentives to bring services and applications to the Kin ecosystem.
A majority of the Kin supply will be allocated to the Kins Reward Engine. And periodically it will unlock to distribute KIN to digital service providers.
Initially the Kin Reward Engine will be administered by the Kin Foundation with Kik as its primary member. But eventually it wants to turn into a DAO, kind of like how Dash is now.
The pic below shows the potential rewards that could be pumped into the ecosystem depending on different market valuations.
This is an exciting project. Kik already has a big user base and experience with an in-app currency. A crypto token seems like a natural fit.
So when is the ICO? Good question. I have not found an exact date yet. However, you can register on the website for alerts.
For all the details on Kik and the KIN token check out the white paper](https://kin.kik.com/papers/Kin_Whitepaper_V1_English.pdf).
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