Kin Q&A: Takeaways from Ted’s October 2018 AMA

Ted sat down for his monthly AMA this week, where he shared updates on our accomplishments in September and answered some of our community’s most popular questions. This month, Ted focused on common criticisms of the Kin project in order to clear the air on topics like decentralization, roadmaps, and additional partners. Check out some of Ted’s key quotes below, and watch the full AMA for more updates on all things Kin.

Yes, Kin’s blockchain is centralized, but that won’t always be so

One criticism we’ve received is that the Kin blockchain is centralized. This is true, but as Ted outlined, when we forked Stellar to create the Kin Blockchain, we prioritized scalability over centralization to provide scalability for consumer experiences, like Kin integrations in Kik and Perfect365. The Kin Blockchain will become decentralized over time, and bringing on partners to run federated nodes is important to us. The community will be the first to know when we have these up and running, but as always, we won’t be sharing dates for when this will happen.

“Yes, the Kin blockchain is centralized. We run all of the nodes that contribute to consensus. But in doing this, we’ve unblocked partners so they can start to scale up with consumers, and can support transactions and support the experience we need, and now the only thing we need to do to decentralize the Kin blockchain is to bring more federation node partners online, which we hope to do soon.”

No, we don’t have a roadmap. And we don’t need one.

When we first launched Kin, we published a roadmap along with it, as doing so was the status quo at the time. In crypto, roadmaps change quickly by nature. Blockchain and crypto technologies are constantly changing, and because of that we’ve come across multiple instances where we’ve needed to change our roadmap in order to move smarter and move faster.

“We realized that if we were communicating every change that happened over time, we’d be leaving a playbook behind for all our competitors to easily follow. We stepped back and said ‘what if there’s a better way? What if instead we publish a strategy and give progress updates on that strategy?’ … It’s less about how we get there, and more about making sure we get there first. That’s why we don’t publish a roadmap”

Additional partners will take time, but the pieces are falling into place.

While you’ve already seen Kin experiences in Kinit and partner apps, like Perfect365 and Kik, we’re focused on ensuring that we can provide the infrastructure and mechanisms necessary to allow future partners to integrate Kin quickly and seamlessly.

“It was only with our fork of Stellar that we could support mainstream consumer scale and deliver a mainstream consumer experience but now that we have that you start to see Kik and Kinit and Perfect365 start to ramp up their integrations of Kin. They’re demonstrating that our blockchain works, and showing other developers real experiences they can try for themselves. And when other partners see these experiences and decide that they’re in, they’re now able to build right away instead of having to wait. There are still a few pieces left — for example, we need backup and restore before we can offer that beautiful, simple mainstream consumer experience where consumers aren’t losing their Kin. As these pieces fall into place, expect to see the rate at which partners are launching real live integrations continue to accelerate.”