K.im is gearing up for launch- the past, the present and the future of K.im
Here is a message from Kim Dotcom (Founder and Chief Evangelist for the K.im project)
For the past few months, we’ve been heads down with development and we’re excited to finally be able to share with our community what we’ve been working incredibly hard on — so keep following us for frequent updates!
K.im is something I am proud to have originally founded and very excited to evangelise for with all my efforts and abilities. I am confident in the team that we’ve built to get a live product to market. To ensure that K.im will be a huge success, we’re laser focused on delivering a high-quality user experience that’s to the standard that end-users expect and I’ve been known for with previous products that have attracted hundreds of millions of users.
In brief, what is K.im?
In future posts, we will be releasing demo videos and demo versions of the platform for all to use. It is currently in beta being used by a group of our shareholders and strategic beta partners.
We are building a platform that we aim to scale to millions of users for sharing and selling content. There are three core principles behind the product:
- Decentralized Commerce;
- Heavily Encrypted and secure;
- Bitcoin Powered.
In future posts, we will dive deeper into each of these product features one at a time and release demo videos and platforms for you to check out.
So, what have we been so busy with?
The markets have been moving very quickly and excruciatingly slow at the same time. From scalability challenges to the hype around ICOs, we realized that rather than chasing everything, we had to remain dedicated to our mission, which brought us back to Bitcoin.
It began with the Bitcoin scaling debate
We knew Bitcoin was the answer to creating a scalable peer-to-peer platform for content sharing and selling, but Lightning was nowhere near ready. The Layer 2 payment protocol only started to double its capacity in the first half of 2019, and still has a long way to go before it’s ready to support mass adoption.
The ICO Hype
We missed the ICO cycle, and it was probably for the best. During a time when everyone was jumping on the ICO bandwagon, our conservative approach led us to find many holes in the legalities of how they’re launched. By the time we were ready to pull the trigger, the ICO market started to look very suspect. With the amount of scams that flooded the industry, we realized that pursuing an ICO and integrating our product with Ethereum would not be strategic.
And then there was BCH
While looking for a scalable solution, we even explored adjusting our product to launch on Bitcoin Cash because it seemed there were clear upsides. The bitcoin cash community seemed interested to invest a very large sum and even adjust their technical roadmap to accommodate our product needs. But we also realized that this wasn’t the way forward.
Back to Bitcoin.
I believe that everything happens for a reason, and avoiding launching a token on Ethereum during the ICO boom and bust might have been a blessing in disguise. It is now clear that having a token with a product that is not live has been a disaster for many tokens and led to legal challenges for the issuers. We are now at a place where the technology exists on Bitcoin to launch a token on the Liquid network, the Lightning network is live and is fully integrated into our main product, and the legal structure for launching a utility token is better understood, tested and we are ready to go.
We want to be driven by adoption not pumps and dumps
It is clear now that launching a token should only ever be done when it can fully be utilised on a growing product. This is something we are sure we can achieve. We want our token to be driven by adoption rather than short term pump and dump schemes.
So where are we now…
We have now launched our beta product to a small group of our shareholders after raising our equity funding. We took on strategic investors like Max Keiser, Simon Dixon, Bitcoin Capital and BnkToTheFuture Capital.
As shareholders, they have opened up their contact book and advised us so we can now drive the company and product forward with no more distractions and a focus on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin first
We have returned to the original vision that we had before all the distractions. We are now focussing on Bitcoin, the K.im token has been built upon Bitcoin through the Liquid sidechain and we will help support the adoption of Bitcoin Lightning network for faster and cheaper payments.
KimCoin Liquid Token
The team and developers behind liquid have given us support and resources to help us navigate the new technology to launch KimCoin on Liquid. We are excited to be one of the drivers of the increasing adoption of Bitcoin based tokens, and to be one of the first major tokens built on Liquid.
Working With The New Bitfinex Token Sale Platform…
The Bitfinex exchange, best known for its deep liquidity in the Bitcoin market, has now announced their support in distributing and launching our KimCoin token that will be used on the K.im platform for content creators and consumers. Bitfinex just announced their new Bitfinex Token Sale platform and have selected us as their first project. See their announcement here.
For this reason, and the fact that Bitfinex has one of the deepest liquidity pools for Bitcoin, has integrated with Liquid already and has one of the first Lightning products — they are the perfect partner to help us launch and distribute our Bitcoin focused token as a bespoke utility token which will enable our product user community to easily and cheaply sell or purchase digital content directly with each other. They have put their full resources behind us and you are able to pre-register and complete Know Your Customer (KYC) registrations in advance here.
The token sale is going live on October 16th and we expect the sale to finish very quickly as they have on previous Bitfinex tokens sales, which have all sold out in minutes after they went publicly live.
For compliance reasons certain countries, including the US, New Zealand and other sanctioned countries, will be restricted from participation. Further details on whether the sale will be available in your country can be found here.
What to expect next?
We hope this update helps you understand what happened in the past, present and our path forward for the future. We will be posting more updates, videos and demo links right here so feel free to follow us on your favourite social media channel. Links can be found on our newly launch K.im website here.
Onwards and upwards, and the team look forward to bringing this product to market with my support as chief evangelist.
Kim Dotcom as founder and chief evangelist for the K.im project.
