Kin — Product Vision For 2018
As you well know, Kin is a digital sharing economy of equal opportunities. An ideal world where millions of people are compensated for the talent they provide through their phones, and a world where developers get compensated for creating amazing places for consumers to provide value to each other. It would be a world where people win together by working together. It would be a digital world built on Kin.
We have the chance of making Kin the most used crypto token in the world. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Kin is destined to be used for value exchange, empowering individuals to take part in this evolving new economy.
Guiding principles
Today the barriers to entry into crypto are high, buying crypto is not easy and using it? Almost impossible. Our goal is to introduce Kin to as many users as possible.
There are a few key principles that guide us when we strive to achieve our vision:
- Earning Kin — instead of introducing new users to crypto by only buying on exchanges, they will be able to receive their first KIN by investing some time and effort. This will allow many people to earn enough KIN to start using it immediately. This is a big shift in mentality, in order for Kin to operate as a currency, people will have to use it as a currency. Positioning Kin differently from other crypto tokens which people buy only for investment purposes.
- Easy to use — We believe in a seamless process that creates simple and easy to use products. Using crypto today is unbelievably complex. With Kin, this can be changed by designing beautiful and easy to use experiences. As Andreas M. Antonopoulos puts it: “We add complexity in the backend to remove complexity in the front end”.
- Creating network effect — Networks become valuable when they get to scale. Differently from other crypto tokens, KIN is going to be integrated into many digital platforms (Kik being the first one), putting it in the hands of millions of users. In this way, Kin can jumpstart the network by injecting financial utility that can be shared between all KIN holders — consumers, developers, brands & investors.
Our product building process
It’s the process that builds the best products.
We believe in learning. We are already learning a lot from Kin’s alpha release (spoiler: a post about it is in the works).
Our goal is to accelerate this learning. This means our product teams are organised as small and agile startups constantly working to create real value for real users. We optimise the Build > Measure > Learn loop, adopting the ‘lean startup’ methodology. Our focus in 2018 is going to be on 3 efforts:
Kin Ecosystem
Our goal for Q1 is to release an open-source SDK for integrating Kin into applications and enable partners to join in on the Kin ecosystem. This SDK must be easy to use in order for it to be adopted by 3rd-party entities such as stand-alone developers and digital platforms.
As developers integrate the Kin SDK, it automatically calculates how much KIN should be awarded to each user, and might provide a small daily airdrop for the most engaged users. It also registers as a blockchain transaction and as such, it will earn the developer a piece of the KRE (Kin Reward Engine).
Key elements for the SDK are: entry point for the wallet, earn / spend opportunities, messaging api, notifications, balance & basic transactions history and more.
The below mockups are very initial (not the real UX or design) — just a very basic starting point:
The Earn & Spend opportunities are a key component of the SDK. Our goal is to provide ‘out of the box’ capabilities and then work with the developers to provide more advanced functionality.
We can categorise earning and spending into 3 levels based on the effort needed on the developer side:
Level 1 — Between users and brands
A user will be able to invest some time and effort and get compensated directly by the brand — no middle man.
A user will be able to use Kin to unlock value from known digital services and brands. Here are a few initial mocks:
Level 2— Between users and the developers
A user will be able to invest some time and help improve the product he is already using — by providing feedback, inviting friends, reviewing the app in the app store. Spending will be done by unlocking in app value and buying digital content from the developer.
Level 3 — P2P, users paying and earning by providing value to other users
This is the key vision for Kin. The value users provide would come in many forms, such as offering advice, hosting experiences or creating content. And the compensation would come in the form of Kin.
Kin Standalone wallet
The Kin Standalone wallet is going to be the simplest and most secure way to hold Kin. As already mentioned: Using crypto today is unbelievably complex. With Kin this can be changed by designing a beautiful and easy to use wallet.
Our goals in building this wallet is also to help educate consumers about crypto tokens and provide the discovery experience of where they can go to use KIN. Because we believe in rapid interactions and getting feedback from real users the initial version of the wallet will be very basic but it will improve constantly based on real usage. The wallet will also deal with security elements such as backup and restoring private keys. Here is a very initial mockup:
Kin Blockchain
Kin has a very strong, in-house, Blockchain team. The goal of this team is to provide the right blockchain infrastructure to support millions of daily Kin users.
Our blockchain team is focused on: Scale, Performance, Security, Decentralisation & Privacy.
One of our key learnings from the alpha release of Kin to Kik users, is that the Ethereum infrastructure cannot currently support the needs of the Kin network.
This means that our Blockchain team is working on a migration process from Ethereum.
We are working closely with other strong blockchain teams such as stellar and ORBS on building the best blockchain infrastructure for Kin.
Another major responsibility of the blockchain team is the KRE — Kin Rewards Engine. This is a major component of injecting a financial utility into the Kin ecosystem by providing a new way for developers from all over the world to monetise by providing Kin to their users. More information can be found here.
Summary
Kin is building real products for real users. The above roadmap is a starting point. We are going to expend and adjust it as input from the community, developers, brands and users starts to come in.
In the upcoming weeks we are going to share our progress. You can expect further product updates from each of our product team members.
Its going to be an exciting year for Kin, and all your feedback/questions/suggestions are much appreciated. Together we will help build a world where people win together by working together.
