Enabling Kik’s Social Economy With Kin-powered Tipping

Earlier this year, Kik announced chat themes — the first Kin-powered experience that would put cryptocurrency in the hands of millions of real users. By focusing on chat themes first, Kik was able to release a highly-requested new feature and introduce its users to the paradigm of earning and spending cryptocurrency in their digital lives. Now that Kik has scaled chat themes to 100 percent of Android users, its armed millions of users with wallets on the Kin Blockchain, positioning it to launch Kik’s social economy with a new feature, admin tipping.

Admin Tipping in Kik

Kik started testing admin tipping a few weeks ago, and today, it has released it to nearly 1,000 public groups. The team has created a seamless experience where selected Android users can simply tap the “Tip” icon on their chat screen, select an admin and an amount of Kin to tip, and send their reward in a matter of seconds.

Building a social economy in Kik

In the real world, our economy is powered through the provision of goods and services which are exchanged for fiat currency. When Kik created its roadmap for Kin-powered experiences, it applied that model to value exchanges that were already happening on the app. In public groups, hundreds of thousands of users interact and exchange value every day, and admins play an integral role in making groups productive, engaging, and safe. They are responsible for letting people into groups, giving advice, sharing relevant content, and removing spam or bad actors — a service that users benefit from. While users reap that benefit, they haven’t had a formal way to recognize admins for the work they do.

This is where Kik believes Kin can be extremely valuable. Kin has the power to facilitate micro-payments that can be used to reward others for making our digital world a better place. Kin gives Kik a tool to encourage user-to-user recognition in a fun and engaging way, which will result in happier and healthier groups on the app. This is the foundation for Kik’s social economy.

A driving force in the Kin Ecosystem

Kik was the first partner to integrate Kin, and to put it into the hands of real users. They recently scaled their first Kin-powered product, chat themes, to 100 percent of Android users, and have been dominating usage in the Kin Ecosystem since. The ecosystem has seen up to 10,000 peak daily active spending transactions, and more than half of those transactions were completed in Kik. .

What’s next?

As Kik continues scaling this experience to more groups, it will begin analyzing how it’s used, and it will improve the experience to make it even better for users. Kik will continue refining the feature by understanding how admins promote tipping behavior in their groups, and seeing what actions users are most willing to reward tips for.

We at Kin are excited to see how our partner Kik uses Kin to incentivize participation in Kik’s social economy, while encouraging better behavior to allow healthy, thriving groups in the digital world they’ve created.

If you’re a Kik user on Android, update your app to see if any of your public groups have access to the new feature.