Kin Ecosystem SDK — Product Vision

On our road to release, we traveled to NYC to meet up with the amazing Kin partnership team to brainstorm with potential partners. We collected feedback and already started thinking ahead towards the next stages of the product.

With this new insight and continued research we are continuing to evolve the Kin experience through iterations in the Kik product and new experiences being built in other digital services.

In this post, we will lay out our thought process behind the Kin Ecosystem SDK and the way we plan to execute it as a team.

Here are some of the challenges we are facing:

• Why does the world need a new monetization model? How is our Marketplace different from Ad-networks and virtual currency monetization models? We are innovators and need to educate platforms and brand partners.
• What is Kin? What is cryptocurrency? How to use it? How to keep it and how to share it? We are the leaders, educating users, keeping it user friendly for the masses.

Recap: Why is Kin building an ecosystem

Our goal as a whole is to provide a new monetization model where everyone involved can benefit; from users, brands, and digital services alike. This will be a model that compensates everyone fairly for their contributions. Kin is an alternative to the centralized model, giving birth to a vibrant, and growing ecosystem of digital services that is compelling for consumers, and fair and open for developers.

Such an ecosystem enables users to earn and spend KIN in ways they find valuable.

Developers, on the other hand, need an easy way to join the ecosystem, and that’s the focus for evolving the SDK to a drag-and-drop “5 minute SDK”.

As mentioned in Alex’s Product Vision post, Q1 will see the current open-source SDK evolve to a “5 minute SDK” where the partner experience to join the Kin ecosystem by integrating Kin into their applications is a seamless experience. The Kin Ecosystem SDK will provide users with a ‘Marketplace’ experience with a core wallet functionally. This will include a place to view your balance, incoming/outgoing payments, and transfer funds. The ‘Marketplace’ is a homebase where users will engage in the earn/spend opportunities.

Diving In

We want to allow users not only to join the Kin ecosystem, but to get rewarded for engaging with top branded offers in the Marketplace. Users will also be rewarded by completing native custom tasks and creating content and experiences for other users to enjoy. This way, anyone can contribute to the Digital Service platform.

Digital Services will enjoy an entirely new monetization model:

• The engagement & retention rate of their already existing users will increase
• Opportunity to create innovative experiences will exist from day one
• Using the SDK, developers and Digital Services can inspire users to create and share content. This will also encourage a P2P marketplace that is based on KIN as a digital currency.
• The main financial incentive for Digital Services is earning KIN rewarded by the Kin Foundation, based on the amount of transactions made within their app.
• The value of the Kin they hold increases as usage and demand grows over time.

So here’s what the next iteration of the partner experience looks like:

Within this “5 minute SDK”, our team’s effort is twofold:

• Out-of-the-box earn & spend opportunities for the end user to immediately start earning and spending KIN.
• Supporting native peer to peer offers within the digital services. This empowers each partner to customize their in-house user experiences.

Our overall mission is to find the right product -market fit and to create a product that users actually want to use and engage with.

This mission includes:

1. Onboarding users successfully. We consider things like communication with users, finding the best entry point in each potential Digital Service, and developing the ability to re-engage with users.
2. Create offer templates for earning and spending opportunities that fits a wide variety of brand partners. Some examples include: videos — imagine a user getting rewarded for watching a tutorial, a trailer, or an ad for their preferred brand, surveys — users will be compensated for sharing their opinions, playable interactions — users can play a mini game and get compensated for their time and feedback, and gift cards or access to exclusive content as spend opportunities.
3. Integrate the Ecosystem SDK in select digital services.
4. Support native offers — Empower Digital Services to add native experiences in the Marketplace and throughout the app. Since we’re dealing with cryptocurrency, the goal is to develop client side APIs for integrating Kin native experiences within digital services as well as Backend support for earn and spend capabilities (including P2P transactions). It means that the Kin APIs will do the “heavy lifting” of the underlying blockchain infrastructure, such as creating wallet, authenticating users, securing funds, and managing transactions.
5. P2P transactions — P2P transactions are an integral experience in many community driven digital services and can be a key component of many Kin native experiences. For example: a user sharing recipes or playlists and other users can tip them for that. P2P unlocks this user behavior and drives the digital shared economy.

Below are some examples of what the user experience looks like for the on-boarding and spending user journey.

User On-boarding flow and spending experience:

This is the entire user flow

User on-boarding and earn / spend flow

So What Now?

As the ecosystem continues to evolve, we will be sharing progress at a regular cadence and welcome all opportunities to collaborate collectively among partners and the community.

Please let us know what you think and feel free to ask any questions.