Kik is an extremely popular instant messaging app, ranked in the top 15 social network apps on AppAnnie. Kik built an experiment called Kik Points which allows users to earn and spend Kik Points to buy and sell content, get paid for visiting shops, and more. Kik Points was wildly popular, reaching over 2.5 million daily transactions at its highest. This shows that there is a big market for digital services with economics built in. Here is where Kin comes in.
Kin is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain built to add economics to digital services such as social networks and messaging apps. Kin will be integrated into Kik in the future, and will partner with many other social networking apps to integrate economics into the apps’ services.
Use cases
Some interesting use cases for an economic token such as Kin in social networks are:
• Having VIP groups that you have to pay to enter, allowing popular people to be paid for their attention
• Paying for user-generated content such as songs, videos, or articles using Kin tokens
• Businesses paying for sharing them on social networks (e.g. If someone takes a picture of them eating at Bob’s Pizza Shop and posts it on the social network, they are paid 0.1 Kin by Bob’s Pizza Shop)
• Global “shoutout” messages that appear on all users’ screens, paid for using Kin.
• Tips can be paid with Kin through the social network apps
• Kik is already a massive platform for bots, and monetizing them with Kin will create interesting experiences and outcomes.
Scalability
One problem with KIN is scalability. The amount of transactions that Kik Points (what Kin is supposed to replace) processed daily was much more than the Ethereum mainnet’s capacity for transactions. The whitepaper does not have a solution to this problem, except for the creation of a centralized sidechain to speed up transactions. This side chain, though, does not fully process transactions, just allowing them to be ‘confirmed’ earlier.
While Kin does not provide a true solution to this problem, there may be potential in placing the Kin token on an Ethereum sidechain such as the ones that loomx.io will create, but the whitepaper does not mention this solution, and because the Kin coin is already deployed, it would be difficult, even impossible, to implement without destroying the token’s value.
My Opinion
While Kin may not have great investment value and its technicals are not very good (though the bulls are now starting to push!), if the project is succesful and they overcome scalability issues and integrate it into their app and others, Kin will be the largest cryptocurrency in the world. Kin has massive potential but has to overcome some major hurdles before it can unleash that potential to be a massive consumer-grade cryptocurrency. At the current time, I would not buy Kin, but as soon as it shows strength and the bulls take over, my stance is to buy as much as you can.
Please comment what the next cryptocurrency I review should be and make sure to stay diversified!