Kin and Kik — Working Together

Kin’s mission to make the world more fair by creating a decentralized cryptocurrency for digital services would be a hard sell without, well, digital services. That’s where Kik comes in — to create a better chat experience by providing our users with the opportunity to earn and spend Kin.

Recently, a select few from the Kik development team travelled to Tel Aviv to meet with our Kin counterparts. Here, we ensured that both teams were aligned on our joint strategy for getting Kin in the hands of Kik users.

For context, here’s an overview of the role that Kik’s developers will play in the integration:

• Build a new feature that uses Kin to enable a better user experience on Kik;
• Seamlessly integrate the Kin SDK into Kik;
• Provide Kin with feedback to improve the education and integration process for future development teams.

And here are the priorities of the Kin developers working on the integration:

• Build an SDK that can be integrated into Kik (and other digital services);
• Build a marketplace where users can earn and spend Kin;
• Offer earn opportunities in the Kin Marketplace for Kik users.

These priorities and goals set the agenda for our visit and a deep dive into the collaboration between the two teams.

Two Teams, One Goal

Since this will be one of the first real world adoptions of Kin in a digital space, we needed to ensure that both development teams are aligned and ready to deliver a smooth feature experience for all.

Much of our week in TLV was focused on technical adoption — can we get an end-to-end transaction to work on Kik? Yes! Can we make some technical changes, like error handling, to ensure that transactions work as smoothly as possible? We sure can!

In addition to technical changes with the Kin team, Kik and Kin’s product managers spent most of the week coordinating their roadmaps so that future iterations of Kin inside Kik and the Kin SDK will be set up for success. The Kin and Kik teams were able to work together to successfully implement API changes and better feature prioritization on the SDK.

Of course, our teams also focused on getting to know each other. This was the first time that some of us had been to Tel Aviv, so we were excited to get to know the team working on Kin face-to-face. Understanding the priorities of the team in Tel Aviv will help us work together better moving forward — between time differences and distance, any extra help in knowing them personally is a bonus.

Outcome

Overall, we had a great trip that allowed Kik and Kin to finally work together in the same location and time zone. We’re getting closer to releasing a new feature that will use Kin to improve the user experience on Kik, and this will pave the way for other digital services to do the same. We all put in some long hours to ensure we had a successful trip, and we’re looking forward to showing you the final product soon.