How do we know, and are you sure you’re not nuts?
Kin is a very misunderstood cryptocurrency. In light of this, I have chosen to highlight it once again and expand on my previous claim that Kin will be the most used cryptocurrency in the world by more carefully walking through what it takes to achieve this, explaining what Kin is, bringing you up to speed on what Kin has accomplished since my first article, and adding a deadline, as the confidence around the claim has increased with what we now know.
And yes… I’m sure.
BEFORE CONTINUING, Download the Kinit App. Trust me. Earn your first Kin (30 seconds) and then follow along with the article. You will get it.
Kinit. Download it or else.
For the Newbies: What is Kin…
I’m going to break this down into steps and walk you through each piece.
Kin is a currency token.
Like Bitcoin, Kin’s main function is the transfer of value between users. It is not designed as a platform for other tokens. Unlike Bitcoin, it is not a coin, as it is not its blockchain’s own native digital asset. It is an application built on top of another blockchain (actually two, I’ll get to that).
Kin is not focused on the physical world
The physical world runs on dollars, and for the most part, it works pretty well. Users generally don’t have a problem with this. They get paid in dollars. They spend in dollars. There’s no real demand to fix a problem that users don’t really have. Today, if I want to spend Bitcoin, I have to purchase Bitcoin with USD, spend it on something, and then the merchant has to convert the Bitcoin back to USD to pay their bills. It doesn’t make any sense.
Besides, who wants to spend a currency that could be worth twice as much tomorrow, and who wants to receive a currency that could be worth half as much tomorrow? Nobody. And it’s not for a lack of trying. We have been trying to get people to buy their coffee with bitcoin for a decade.
“It’s not a technological problem. It’s not a user experience problem. It’s a logical problem.” — Ted Livingston
Kin is concentrating on the digital world. Instead of spending Kin on things that have a dollar value, Kin is being assigned to things without an inherent dollar value, like stickers, chat themes, a quality group chat, digital weapons and armor, other unlockables, and other abstract digital goods and services.
You don’t think about the exchange rate of USD/YEN whenever you purchase goods, and you shouldn’t when spending Kin either. So essentially, Kin is kickstarting a new digital economy as the internet’s native currency.
Kin is an ecosystem token.
You’ve probably figured this out by now, but I have to drill it in because there is a mis-kin-ception that Kin is only a “Kik-token.”
Kin is not just Kik
Kik is a billion dollar established tech company that created the Kin token and is using it in their app, but it is NOT only used in Kik. Kik is merely the launch pad.
It’s also important to note that Kin is a _de_centralized currency in an ecosystem of centralized apps. Decentralized consumer apps suck, frankly. Centralized Kik is better than decentralized Kik. Centralized Snapchat is better than decentralized Snapchat. And at the end of the day, mainstream users don’t care about decentralization, if they even know what it means. All they care about is fast, frictionless, interesting features, and a great user experience. We can improve on that experience by aligning the incentives of the app developers with their users via a decentralized currency shared between apps, and I will explain how.
You can earn it .
Like Bitcoin, you can earn Kin. But the ways you can earn it are different.
Bitcoin is brilliant. It offers everyone an equal opportunity to get rewarded for their contributions. Everyone plays by the same rules of the game, and everyone is fairly rewarded in a trustless way. Bitcoin rewards miners for the computing power they contribute to solving an arbitrary math problem. Effectively, you are rewarded with Bitcoin for burning electricity.
Damn, yo
But what if we could take the same concept of fairly rewarding contributions, and instead of burning electricity, we reward value creation?
Kin has the KRE.
Kin has a decentralized incentive protocol to drive mainstream adoption — something that no other cryptocurrency in the world has. It’s called the Kin Rewards Engine (KRE).
Instead of inflating the supply by rewarding miners for burning electricity, Kin inflates via value creation. Developers of apps who adopt Kin are incentivized to create new features and experiences in their apps to maximize the transaction volume in Kin through user-to-user interaction. The KRE pays out a fixed amount of Kin each day and divides it up proportionally to each app in the ecosystem based on the transaction volume that they generated. Read that one more time and then continue.
Kin is a fundamentally new way to monetize.
Now that developers can be paid via the KRE, their incentives are aligned with their users. This means developers no longer have to show their users advertisements or steal and sell their data to make money. They can make money simply by making a great user experience, and their users can even be rewarded for contributing valuable content. And now, for the first time ever, app developers can work together as a collective unit to compete with Facebook and Google, who monopolize the advertising model of monetization and “copy and crush” everyone else.
…and how do we know it will be the most used crypto by the end of the year?
To answer this question, we first need to know what it takes to be the most used crypto:
Currently, the most-used cryptocurrency in the world is Steem. It has ~60,000 Daily Active Users (DAU) and does ~1.2 Million tx/day.
That’s it.
No really, that’s it.
Pitiful, right?
A decade of blockchain technology and this is what we have to show for it.
Okay, cut to the chase.
Kin is being adopted by a ton of apps, several of which have active users in the millions.
- Kik alone has 15 million MAU, which translates to a few million active users per day.
- IMVU has 5 million MAU. They even have a growing active marketplace for content creators built into the app already.
On top of these, there are forty (read: 40) other apps that are adopting Kin this October, and will be live in the app stores. You can check them all out here. This is courtesy of the Kin Developer Program, and this is not the only one. There will be a second batch, perhaps before the end of the year, where developers will have a shot at being early adopters of the currency and rewarded with approximately $120k each (going by the first one). Of these apps, Nearby has over 5 million downloads on Android, and several other apps have hundreds of thousands of downloads. This is only the beginning.
There is also the Kinit App that you hopefully already downloaded. This is sort of like the main hub and wallet, where you can discover the other apps in the ecosystem and use it as just one of many places to earn some Kin in exchange for your time. It also has a few spend options. More spend options will exist in the future, but for now, you’ll have to settle for Amazon gift cards and the like (wow that really sucks).
Current Standing
Kin currently has over 9000! DAU.
This is more than all ethereum dApps _combined (_really setting the bar high…). That is how pitiful cryptocurrency is in the eyes of mainstream adoption. Almost all of these active users are just from the Kinit app. Kin is also available in Kik, but it’s in private beta, and not many users have access to it. Of the users that do have access to it, they only have chat themes as a spend option. Kik is quickly improving the experience with an agile and iterative approach to meet market fit as quickly as possible. “Move like the wind.”
Soon, Kik will be open to the public, fit with all the bells and whistles it needs, and Kinit will begin to go global as they exit the public beta stage and adapt the user experience beyond users in the US, beginning with Canada and expanding into Europe and Asia.
Deep breath. FURTHERMORE, Kin is developing an SDK with Unity to bring Kin to mobile game developers and quickly expand the ecosystem.
All of this together absolutely shatters the current most-used record. And what’s more impressive is that it will be by mainstream consumers, not crypto enthusiasts.
You forgot to talk about the two blockchains thing
Right. So a big part about being the most used cryptocurrency in the world is that you need a blockchain that can handle it. Currently, Ethereum cannot handle it alone. It’s not fast, it’s not nearly scalable enough (Kin alone would crash it instantly), and it’s not cheap enough. But it does have two good qualities: It has liquidity, and it is decentralized and secure.
To complete the puzzle, Kin forked the Stellar blockchain to create a scalable, fast, and fee-less blockchain. Stellar-fork Kin is placed in the app for users, and they are creating an atomic swap to the erc20 Kin to get the best of both worlds.
A quick note on potential “competitors”
Steem, Mithril, BAT, reddcoin (lol), and others like this are kind of similar to Kin. But not really.
Steem is a single platform coin with nowhere to grow. Mithril is also a single platform token, no installed base of users, and still doesn’t help developers monetize. BAT has an installed base of users on Brave, but it’s not user friendly (none of these “competitors” are). Also, BAT wants to pay users for watching ads. Kin is creating a new way to monetize without ads. It’s just not the same. BAT is counting on your mom and dad, brother, and sister to enable ads in their browser and watch them for money instead of just using an ad blocker and continuing with their lives. BAT also doesn’t create blockchain wallets for you. They just give you BAT that you can store in your own wallet that you create yourself (consumer experience nightmare). Do I have to touch on reddcoin? Kin is really the only horse in this race. Compare the user experience of the Kinit app (have you downloaded it yet…? Seriously, 30 seconds. Come on.) to this:
The Nightmare
Nobody has a reward system like the KRE. Nobody has an installed user base anywhere as large as Kin’s by a long shot. Nobody has a scalable blockchain for mainstream consumer apps. Nobody has a system of getting apps to work together to compete against the monopolies, and align the incentives of the developers and their users. Nobody else is in the race.
You’re still reading?
So there you have it. By the end of the year, Kin is going to dwarf the crypto space (there are only about 6 million active crypto users total). With millions of users earning and spending Kin in an ecosystem of apps, Kin will have more utility and demand than any other cryptocurrency. Period.
Look out for the headlines.
If you liked what you read, follow me @ twitter.com/thelatemercutio. Also consider checking out nufi.io, an up and coming crypto news site with no bull shit.