My talk at DroidCon TLV
In the last few months our mobile development team in Tel Aviv has gone through a very interesting journey while building our first open source library that connects to the ethereum blockchain and provides an API to manage an account of our new digital token KIN.
So here is how the journey began: Kik issued a new cryptocurrency called KIN and raised nearly $100M in one of the most successful ICOs this year. Those of you who are not familiar with Kin may wonder why people would care enough to invest in it. Here is a brief explanation as I see it: The Kin vision is to create an ecosystem of digital services, that does not rely on pushing advertisements to users or on a big “exit” to one of the technology giants for monetization. A decentralized ecosystem where developers, digital services, content providers and users can generate content and offer value to each other while being rewarded for their contribution to the ecosystem. In this system users can both earn and spend KIN in ways that they choose and generate the most value for them. (For those of you who understand bitcoin a little, contributions to the ecosystem will be rewarded in a similar way that bitcoin miners are rewarded for maintaining the bitcoin network). For a more detailed explanation of this vision you are welcome to read our whitepaper and for more on the rewarding system read the Kin Reward Engine medium post and RFC paper.
I am personally very excited about this vision, because it aligns well with my personal beliefs and values, as the whole system is built upon giving power to every participant and encourages cooperation, a fair economy and a win-win paradigm. In addition the technology is super interesting and in this journey we feel like we are taking part in the bigger effort of bringing blockchain to maturity and to mainstream usage.
KIN, a digital token, was implemented as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. The Tel Aviv mobile team was assigned to build an open source SDK that creates and manages a KIN account and allows developers to easily implement transactions for payments.
So we set off in this journey together, with a lot of excitement and in the last few months we got immersed into blockchain technology, gained a deeper understanding of how bitcoin mechanics work, what the ethereum blockchain has to offer, what mobile libraries are out there today to be used with ethereum and how they can be used. For a detailed comparison of two library options that offer an android API to connect to ethereum see Shay’s post.
We also discovered what it’s like to move from a private company that has private goals, to a wider organization that serves a bigger purpose that the general public is interested in. We moved to writing all our code as open source software and to being transparent by letting the community know everything we are doing through our channels on medium, reddit and telegram. For the questions raised during this transition, read our mobile director’s post.
As we got more deeply into the actual implementation of our SDK we faced so many challenges! For example see Oren’s post on a bug he solved in the go-ethereum mobile library and Yossi’s posts on pending balances and making sense of ethereum nonce(sense).
We have learned so much in the last few months that I thought it would be great to build a talk around this journey. So when I saw the DroidCon TLV call for papers, I submitted my abstract, yay!
In my talk, I will briefly explain what is blockchain in reference to bitcoin, ethereum and DApps (Decentralized Apps), show you how we designed our SDK while thinking of a minimal viable product of Kin inside of the Kik messenger application and most importantly I will show you code from our SDK, explaining how it can be used and what type of cool things you can do with it. Finally I will dive more deeply into some of our code and talk about challenges we faced.
The greatest challenge in preparing this talk, is that I have so much I’d like to share with you that it could probably fit at least 3 lectures — not just a 35 minute talk. I had to work hard to extract the most valuable and interesting bits that make sense for an audience of android developers. Everything is ready now and I look forward to it!
Would love to see you at DroidCon TLV. If you want to join and don’t have a ticket already, you are welcome to use code joinme30 here to get a 30% discount . Following DroidCon, I’ll be sharing my slides on a follow up post so stay tuned!
Thanks for reading, looking forward to seeing you!
Berry
