Kin Q&A with Ted: Takeaways from Our Fourth AMA (4/10/2018)
For Ted’s fourth AMA the community raised some excellent questions about exchanges, partnership announcements, and how transaction volume will impact the price of Kin.
A few of Ted’s answers are summarized below. We look forward to sharing more about some of these topics in the coming weeks.
Exchanges:
We have been having lots of great conversations with exchanges. Ted mentioned that as we talk to these exchanges, we consistently hear one question: “If I buy this token, can I use it? Does the coin have utility? And for Kin the answer is yes.”
But exchanges weren’t the highest priority for us in the early phases of this process; in order to make Kin the most used cryptocurrency in the world, we had to prioritize other things first.
“Being on major exchanges needs to happen before the launch of the Kin Rewards Engine but it doesn’t need to happen before that, and I know that’s painful. I get it. But is getting on a major exchange important before your blockchain can achieve consumer scale? No. Not to us. Is it more important than being the first cryptocurrency to be used by billions of consumers? No. Not to us. Is it more important than being the first cryptocurrency to have an accelerating number of developers getting their mainstream consumers to use this cryptocurrency? No, not to us. And so exchanges are important, but they’re not in our top three priorities. Not at this time.”
“As we get closer to the blockchain being ready, as we get closer to Kin being integrated into Kik at a real consumer scale, and as we get closer to the launch of the SDK and the KRE, now these exchanges are becoming more and more important. So we’re having conversations, and we’ll continue to have many conversations.”
Current Priorities:
- Demonstrate that blockchain is ready for mainstream scale
- Demonstrate that we can use our blockchain to have millions of consumers using Kin in their daily lives
- Give developers the tools and incentives they need to join the Kin ecosystem
Unity:
In March, we announced a partnership with Unity Technologies. Unity will help develop a gaming-specific SDK to eventually allow developers to integrate Kin into their games through the Unity Asset Store.
We were asked if there were any specific games that were currently using Unity that had approached us to integrate Kin yet. But without a consumer-ready blockchain and an SDK, we aren’t able to have those conversations yet.
Also, that’s not a focal point of the partnership. We will work with Unity to co-select a group of beta developers to integrate Kin, we will co-develop the SDK, co-host events all around the world, and we will market these experiences together.
“When we announced Unity, the reason we announced it is, we said 1) these guys are the biggest and the best at what they do; but, 2) this is not an announcement that Unity will be using Kin. This is an announcement that Unity will be working with Kin to help all of their developers integrate the cryptocurrency when it is ready.”
Partnership announcements:
Last year we told our community that we would announce three to five digital service partners by the end of the first quarter in 2018. We announced one (Unity), and did not take the time to explain more. Ted said we made two mistakes there: the first was that we were not up front about why we chose to announce only one partner, and the second was making the commitment to three to five in the first place.
Going forward we will be as transparent as possible in letting the community know what our priorities are, and will give updates on projects and progress against these priorities. But, we will announce things as they happen with a “biggest and best” strategy in mind.
“First, why did we only announce one? We only announced one because we realized that if we announced anybody other than the biggest and the best at what they do, that we should be shooting ourselves in the foot.”
“There are millions of developers in the app store, we could have gone and found three of them, easily. Yeah they’re not the biggest and the best, but hey we have three to five, we met our commitment, let’s keep going forward. What would that have done? What that would have done is all the other partners we’re talking to, potential partners, who are the biggest and best at what they do, would look at those announcements and say, ‘Hmm those aren’t as big as we were hoping, maybe I should wait and see what happens.’”
“And so we sat there and said okay we have two options. 1) We can follow through and hit our goal of 3–5 partnerships and achieve that today and shoot ourselves in the foot going forwards; or 2) We can announce just one and miss our goal for today but not shoot ourselves in the foot going forward because we only announced the biggest and the best partners, or the absolute best in the world at what they do. And we decided to do the latter. Our mistake was, that we weren’t upfront about that.”
“The second mistake we made was making this commitment in the first place. We are on the bleeding edge of technology, we’re on the bleeding edge of economics, of user experience design. And what that means is there are so many variables. So if we throw out a date like oh we want to do this by Q3, we have no idea of what’s going to come up between now and then, and what might get in the way of achieving that goal.”
Influence of Kin transactions on price:
The only thing contributing to demand for cryptocurrencies today is speculation that the price of that currency will rise. But there’s another way.
We believe that once we have the tools in place to ensure that Kin is a cryptocurrency that mainstream consumers can actually use — by spending Kin to enter group chats, transact with digital services, and so on — the ability to use the currency will drive up demand (given the fixed supply). When that happens, the price goes up.
“Today there is only one thing that is contributing to demand for every cryptocurrency... Why do I buy Bitcoin? Because I’m scared it’ll be worth more tomorrow. Why don’t I buy Bitcoin? I don’t buy it to buy a coffee, I don’t buy it to use, I just buy it to speculate. And while that is true, what that means is that for all these cryptoprojects, demand for them is purely driven by speculation.”
“I want Kin to be the first cryptocurrency that’s used by a mainstream consumer base as a currency. Meaning they would buy it, even if they knew it would never go up in price, because they want to use it. Because if we can do this, if we can make Kin the most used cryptocurrency in the world, that will create the most demand in the world.”
