Kin Q&A with Ted: Takeaways from Our Second AMA (2/20/18)

Our second AMA on February 20th covered a lot of ground on our priorities for Kin and plans for achieving them.

Ted talked about exchanges, blockchain migration, and how Kin might be received in the Apple App Store. He also shared new info on the Kin payout strategy and our development of a standalone Kin wallet.

Check out our takeaways from the live Q&A and watch the full session above for more details.

Liquidity: “Liquidity is obviously really important to prospective partners. Getting on major exchanges is something that we’re focused on, and that we need in order for Kin to be successful.”

“But given the state of the crypto market, we need to both respect the requests of these exchanges to keep everything confidential and we also need to go about this very carefully so that we’re completely onside from a regulation point of view. This is a high priority for us.”

Token Management: “Another [piece] we’re building out is getting partners in place not just to build digital services, but also to build all the complimentary pieces to make the ecosystem work. One of those is exchanges for developers — making it really easy for them to not just manage their own Kin from the reward engine, but to also have the option for someone else to manage it for them.”

Taxation: “Tax is something we’ve spent a lot of time looking at and working on, with people from KPMG and all over the world contributing to how we make the tax side of this work for developers as individuals… it’s something we’re paying attention to and making sure we’re doing in a tax efficient way.”

Ethereum & Stellar: “While we were originally thinking we need to be on one [blockchain] the other, we’ve come to the conclusion that not only is it possible, but it would actually be best, if we could be on both — if Kin as a token could move across blockchains, across both Ethereum and stellar. And the reason for that is that these two blockchains target a different use case.”

“Ethereum is really plugged into the crypto market. Exchanges, wallets, hardware wallets… that whole ecosystem and infrastructure arounds tokens for crypto [participants] is all built out and very mature [on Ethereum]. But what Ethereum is not great at is high scale transactions with low fees and low confirmation times, and that’s something Stellar is good at.”

“With Stellar we can do way more transactions with way faster confirmation times and several orders of magnitude lower transaction fees. But, Stellar is not plugged into exchanges and wallets; it’s missing all these other pieces.”

“We looked at this and said… How could we use both in a very simple way?’ By and large, we can keep these running in two different networks, and support each better by combining these two systems.”

“How we make this really simple is that the digital services that consumers are going to be interacting with on a daily basis… will happen on top of Stellar, with really high scale low confirmation times. For those consumers that are earning more, they could take that and move it over to Ethereum to put in hardware wallets or exchanges. Or, they go out and buy Kin on Ethereum and move that into the Stellar blockchain. In this way we think that we can combine for the best of each blockchain while getting rid of the disadvantages.”

Crypto As An In-App Purchase? “When it comes to a cryptocurrency inside an app, particularly on the Apple platform, there is a question mark there. A cryptocurrency unlocks a feature set, and historically that’s something you’d have to pay with in-app purchases.”

“But in-app purchases [as a model don’t] work for this digital sharing economy... [because] people are both earning and spending in very small amounts.”

“So what does Apple think about that? It’s early, and we don’t know, but when I think about Apple and what they’re known for, I can’t think see anything that’s better for them than something like Kin, because they’ve always been champions for the rights of consumers and the rights of developers.”

“By adopting, allowing, and supporting something like Kin, [Apple] would be saying ‘hey consumers, we believe in your rights and we want to be aligned with you.’ [It would be] a way to put consumers back into control, to put developers back into control. We think Kin on Apple is a super exciting thing.”

Kin Rewards Engine: “[Our vision with the KRE is that] if you help us contribute to creating amazing places to earn and spend kin, you’ll get kin from the reward engine. What’s evolved is how think about paying out this Kin.”

“Instead of paying out large amounts in the beginning, [we’re looking at] paying out smaller amounts so that instead of making it subjective we can still make it algorithmic… if we start small, we can weed out ways to spam and game [the system] while still having it be algorithmic. Over time, as we get confident that the algorithm is working, robust, and hard to game/spam, the payouts start to ramp up and the ecosystem starts to grow and those payouts grow more valuable. Then we tail off the payouts.”

“The vision for how we pay this out has evolved, but we want to keep it a decentralized incentive platform… we want to take all of the logic and put it into a piece of code so that as a developer, I know the rules of the game and I know those rules are guaranteed — that if i create X output I will be rewarded X amount of Kin, based on a cryptocurrency there will never be more of, and based on a software platform where there will be demand for this as the only way to transact in this ecosystem.”

Standalone App: “If you’re a user and you’re earning and spending Kin in all of these different places, wouldn’t you like to consolidate your balance into a single account? And be able to manage that balance in a simple yet secure way? That’s the role of the standalone wallet — this cross-app earning and spending.”

“Centralization is not the point of the standalone app. We see it as a prototype and example of an application that anyone should be able to build, with open code.”

“It’s sort of like the wallet app becomes the browser — [which is] the way we access and manage all the different websites we use. The standalone wallet becomes a way to access and manage the Kin we earn and spend in all these different applications, but just like the browser it should be an open standard: Anybody should be able to build their own wallet and anybody should be able to choose which wallet they want to use.”