2018 Q1 Highlights for the Kin Ecosystem Foundation

Kin’s reach, community, and team grew significantly in Q1 as we sharpened our vision and seeded our ecosystem. Moving into the second quarter, we’re feeling stronger than ever about building a digital-services economy where everyone is fairly compensated for their contributions.

Our own team’s contributions in Q1 led to major milestones for Kin. We worked together across two continents to “win” our way to industry-leading product releases, partner progress, blockchain news, and more. Here are the key highlights from a huge quarter in Kin’s history.

Engineering & Development

Q1 kicked off with a restructuring of our engineering department. We aligned our Tel Aviv-based developers, product managers, designers, and QA engineers into three separate, cross-functional “feature teams” each focused on a specific initiative — be it our blockchain infrastructure, Kin Ecosystem and marketplace, or the standalone app. The new structure allows us to build, learn and iterate in a fast, agile way.

That agility helped us reach one of our most exciting, market-leading moves to date: Our integration of Stellar as a second blockchain supporting Kin.

Adding another blockchain was necessary to overcome the challenges we’ve had on Ethereum (such as scalability, slow confirmation times, and high transaction fees). After conducting load testing and due diligence to determine Stellar could satisfy our near-term needs, we prepared a bi-directional “migration” plan for Kin tokens that maintains the integrity of Kin’s allocation schedule. As part of our two-phase plan, we’re now creating an “atomic swap” or “lock-and-swap” mechanism to enable 1:1 swaps of Kin from Ethereum to Stellar or vice versa.

We’ve also built a private testnet on Stellar, which we’re using to conduct real-world simulations to stress-test Kin on Stellar at scale. The insights from this industry-leading testing will help us evolve our product roadmap (and provide high-value research to partners) as we continue to advance the Kin mission.

Product Updates

At the product level, we built and released two foundational, open-source components of the Kin Ecosystem in Q1:

• The core blockchain SDKs (iOS, Android, and Python) — which provide the building blocks for functional Kin experiences on the Stellar blockchain; and
• The first version of the Ecosystem SDK (or what we call the “5 minute SDK”) — which digital services will use to integrate Kin into existing or new apps in as little as five minutes

The just-released 5 minute SDK essentially “wraps” the blockchain API of the core SDK into a service package — allowing brands to easily incorporate real-time, user-facing earn and spend experiences with Kin into their native product flows.

We deliver that service package through a custom-built ecosystem backend (also open source) that provides certain blockchain functionalities as a service — such as Stellar account creation (for user onboardings), offer lifecycle management, order and transaction histories, and more.

The Ecosystem SDK will be integrated into Kik soon, with Kin experiences to be built on it inside the app. The SDK was also released with the Kin Marketplace built into its design and technical workflows: Users of partner apps will gain out-of-the-box access to polls, tutorials, and other marketplace opportunities to earn extra Kin or redeem it on special offers.

Testers of our ‘Kinit’ beta app, which also launched in Q1, are currently taking part in the first earn-and-spend experiments with Kin. And their experiences are positive! We’re getting great feedback from our initial testers as we gain insights into how they use the Kin token.

Our standalone app vision is evolving — and the Kinit beta is just the first experiment – but it’s exciting to conduct tests with real users making real blockchain transactions. Keep an eye out for research posts with insights from our beta testing efforts, qualitative studies, and initial partner learnings.

Partnerships/Ecosystem

Our product progress has set the stage for our success with a wide variety of stakeholders. And so have recent changes to our economic framework: our team spent part of Q1 revising the Kin Rewards Engine model following our request for comments.

After receiving feedback from Kin holders, crypto experts, and prospective partners, we’ve defined an economic framework that appeals to partners while leaving room for adaptability. With that structure supporting us, we’re seeding three kinds of community-driven partners into the overall Kin Ecosystem:

• Digital services partners that will integrate the Kin SDK for native earn and spend opportunities
• Platform/channel partners that will expose Kin to many digital services developers
• Brand partners that will offer out of the box earn and spend marketplace opportunities

As we debut new partners in Q2, we’ll outline how each deal supports the ecosystem.

We did that with our first platform partnership last week, sharing how Unity Technologies — creator of the world’s most widely-used real-time 3D development platform — partnered with us to give millions of game developers access to a custom Kin Gaming SDK. Unity powers 50 percent of all new mobile games — creating a huge opportunity for Kin to spark network effects around crypto adoption, gamer acquisition, and cross-promotion of digital services.

Those network effects will deliver huge value to partners. So as we build a new economy from the ground up, we’re exploring how to spark momentum from both traditional and non-traditional partnerships. We’re in talks with entities interested in hackathons and other dev-first collaborations, for example, and having discussions about bringing Kin to crypto-friendly international markets — with several Kin team members on the ground in Japan right now.

As our product continues to develop, we’ll continue to test, iterate and improve our value proposition for partners. But already, we’re in a great position to seed the ecosystem for success and look forward to sharing updates with you throughout Q2!

Community Updates

Q1 saw us gain exciting momentum with the Kin community. With over 7,000 members on our main Telegram channel and 9,100 readers for our Kin Foundation Subreddit, there are hundreds of Kin conversations happening every day.

The volume is growing as more and more people get excited about Kin. We expanded our community team in Q1 to handle the growth: Six moderators are now on staff to answer token holders’ pressing questions, manage our AMA sessions, build relationships with crypto experts and mobilize our power users to share their enthusiasm for Kin.

Today, that enthusiasm shows itself in community members’ creativity and eagerness to share the Kin vision with newcomers. Our top Redditors and Telegram members are writing content about Kin, creating Kin-branded graphics and maps and sharing insightful ideas about why Kin matters (and how it can reach mass-market adoption).

The next phase is about turning that enthusiasm into advocacy. We’re meeting 30 of our top community members at an in-person event soon (read on for more details!) to strengthen community bonds and call Kin’s biggest fans to action. Stay tuned to our Kin Contributors Medium for updates on future community programs, Blockchain Academy events, and other outreach initiatives.

Growing the Team

Across our different office locations and business units, we welcomed a dozen new Kin hires to the organization in Q1. In addition to the new community teammates mentioned above, we brought in hires focused on product development and design, strategy and operations, communications and marketing, research and development, and more.

And we’re still on the hunt! We’re currently looking to fill the following engineering jobs based in Tel Aviv:

• Senior server developer to help us develop tools and infrastructure to power the backend of our ecosystem
• iOS developer to help us build out our open source SDKs for mobile

We’re also seeking a New York-based summer intern to assist with research and analysis for our growing consumer insights initiative. If you’re a rising senior or grad student, check out the role. It’s an awesome (paid) opportunity to help us uncover the motivations, attitudes, and behaviors driving consumer behavior in the emerging cryptocurrency space.

As we understand more and more of those motivations, we’ll use the knowledge to build out the future of our technology and our team. So stay tuned! We expect to ramp up hiring across all our Kin units — especially our partnerships team — in the coming quarters.

Communications Highlights

With 22,000+ Twitter followers, two Kin Medium channels, and an active crypto community consuming our content, we’ve seen tons of engagement in 2018. Across our Kin Foundation and Kin Contributors blogs, people read our content for nearly 300,000 minutes in Q1.

Our most-read and most-viewed content runs the gamut — with product- and vision-focused pieces proving just as popular as our blockchain posts. Here are several of the top-read blogs from each platform this quarter, plus the latest media coverage for our major announcements.

Kin Foundation

• The World Changing Idea Behind Bitcoin Isn’t What You Think | Ted Livingston, Feb. 26
• Insights from Kin Initial Product Launch | Oded Betav, Jan. 10
• Kin, Stellar & Ethereum: New Info on Our Blockchain Infrastructure | Gadi Srebnik, March 21

Kin Contributors

• Kin — Product Vision For 2018 | Alex Frenkel, Jan. 2
• Kin Standalone App — Product Vision | Sarit Ariel, Jan. 25
• Quick Overview of Consensus Models | Oded Noam, Jan. 3

In the news:

• Blockchain Growing Pains Show There’s No Ledger to Rule Them All, March 21, Bloomberg
• Ethereum and Stellar? Kik’s Kin Token to Use Two Chains, March 21, Coindesk
• Game Giant Unity to Work with Kik’s ICO Token, March 28, 2018, Coindesk
• Unity Lets Developers Use Kin Cryptocurrency to Reward Gamers, March 29, 2018, VentureBeat

Looking Forward

Q2 is kicking off with a bang for Kin. We’re especially excited about our first Kin Ambassadors event in NYC, which is happening next week!

The event will bring 30 of our top community members together for two days of in-person updates, education, and conversation about Kin (complete with expert sessions and special guest speakers). Keep an eye out for recaps, videos, and social media updates! Follow #KinNYC on April 11 & 12 to stay engaged with the event while it happens live.

So what’s next after that? Our ecosystem is evolving as rapidly as the crypto space at large. In Q2, we look forward to:

• Building out our Stellar-Ethereum swap mechanism;
• Growing our tester community for the Kinit beta app and sharing research/insights;
• Speaking at several major crypto conferences (see you at Consensus!);
• Stress-testing our blockchain functionalities to prove the scale of Stellar;
• Sharing news on forthcoming partnerships;
• Completing the Kik integration to start sparking mainstream adoption; and more.

Along the way, we’ll be as transparent about our progress as possible.

As we’ve told you before, it’s helpful to have the community holding us accountable to our (always aggressive) goals. So stay engaged with us! Reach out on Telegram, post on Reddit or send us a tweet — we’re excited to have you supporting us on our journey to a better, fairer digital economy.