In the era of cryptocurrency bubble, we may have some time to pay attention to the other altcoins, rather than the price fluctuations of mainstream currencies, such as bitcoin prices.
Below, I will introduce you to Kin cryptocurrency.
When Kin cryptocurrency was just released, it was hot and considered to be an ideal investment project. Because it is a bit counter-opportional compared to other projects. Maybe the contrarian is not entirely correct, but as an encryption project, it is a bit like the mirror of most projects.
First, introduce the project. Kin is the native currency that will be used in the Kik messaging application. Kik is already a successful company with a messaging app with 15 million active users. The company's valuation is over $1 billion.
The Kik team created the Kin token as an incentive for Kik users as a tool to reward users and drive network effects. The user can get Kin by creating content, and others then reward by giving Kin, performing small tasks (such as watching an advertisement) or any other means.
The appeal to users is that Kin value has the actual monetary value that can be used to purchase the actual item.
This project is very ambitious for encryption projects and is a very high risk/very high potential reward in my book. As I mentioned, Kin faces some of the opposite challenges in many projects. Most new ICO projects face the challenge of creating viable products and the challenge of attracting users to use the product. Kik has a powerful product and a strong user base. The challenge they face is how to successfully integrate Kin into the ecosystem.
The biggest challenge they face is the inherent scalability issues that currently plague the entire encryption space. With a user base of 15 million, even if 10% of people try to conduct a daily transaction with Kin, they will overwhelm the Ethereum network.
The Kik team is aware of this and is actively looking for options, including the possible transition from the Ethereum blockchain to Stellar. A Raiden network using a state channel may also be a viable option, but it has not been fully operational so far.
Getting their users to use Kin will be the next challenge. I believe this is a much smaller challenge; they are motivated by their ICO to motivate users (read: give enough users a time of Kin and let users see that they can actually use their Kin for real merchandise) . However, this still depends on how well they implement the integration of Kin into their existing platform.
From a purely investment perspective, another challenge is to include tokens in major kin exchanges. I don't believe this is a top priority for the Kik team; as far as I know, they have not made any effort, I love and hate. I like it because I think they are more focused on making products than flipping coins to make huge profits. However, I personally hope that I can choose to convert some of my coins, and there are more exchange options that will be fine. As of now, most of the transactions have been done on Etherdelta and Mercatox. (Edit 2/19 / 18- Kin is now available on Idex.market, which is a decentralized exchange. You have to use metamask and your own Eth wallet, but it has pretty good mobility and is very simple)
All in all, if Kin can find a way to successfully scale and implement, this may be one of the first real use cases for crypto tokens, and the potential profit is huge. As I mentioned, challenges and risks are equally important.