Kin Q&A with Ted: Takeaways From Our Third AMA (3/14/18)

For Ted’s third video AMA, the community raised some excellent questions about our tech progress, partner strategy, and regulatory considerations.

A few of Ted’s answers are summarized below. We look forward to sharing even more about these topics — including end-to-end info on our Stellar relationship and long-term blockchain plans — in coming weeks.

Ecosystem Partnerships:

We’ve been making good progress in initial discussions with potential partners, though we can’t share any names just yet. We’re working through details on taxes, regulation, and even the technology, and will have an update by March 31. The digital services we are going after are those that are community-driven, where people are already creating value for each other.

“It’s clear from absolutely every partner we talk to, up to and including partners with hundreds of millions of users, that this is something they need. They need a new monetization model. By trying to compete for advertising dollars against the monopolies of Facebook and Google, it’s just a losing game. I think literally everybody we’ve talked to has been super excited about Kin.”

Promoting Kin:

It’s true that we haven’t yet done much mainstream marketing to drive awareness for Kin — first we need to release products that will support mainstream adoption of developers and consumers in order to create a call to action for them to join the ecosystem.

“Once we have the 5-minute SDK at market that any developer can use to integrate Kin into their apps, once we have that Kin Rewards Engine that any developer can compete for the get compensated, and once we can say to consumers ‘look at all these great places you can go to earn and spend Kin’ there really isn’t a call to action — that’s what we’re waiting for now, we’re putting those pieces in place.”

Purchasing Kin:

In the short term, you’ll have to use an exchange. Purchasing in-app, directly, could happen in the medium- or long-term future, but we need to first show consumers that there is a separation between fiat currency in a global economy and Kin in our digital economy.

“[With Kik Points] we found that it was important to launch a new currency in this new economy that was separate from this existing economy… we said ‘this is not about the pennies you get for [in a fiat] economy, this is about the points you get for this virtual economy.’ So in the early stages of Kin we think it’s going to be pretty important for users to… earn Kin not for what they take out to an exchange, sell, and buy in the real world. Instead it’s about what you can get in the new digital economy.”

“But over time, as this economy grows and there’s more and more people earning and spending it… and at that point it will make sense to add more and more ways to purchase directly into all these digital services.”

Tokens as Securities? Utilities?

“To us it’s a very clear answer. A security gives you a right to the future profits of an entity… But a currency is only valuable to the degree that you can use it. It’s [about] utility — the utility it has today and the utility it has tomorrow.”

Blockchain Plan:

In our last AMA, we talked about having Kin exist on both Ethereum and Stellar in order to meet the needs of both consumers and participants. We held off on publishing an FAQ because we felt we answered the main questions that our community had, and are currently waiting to share the results of tests that we’re running.

“If you have Kin on Ethereum, you’re not going to have to do anything, it just stays there, because what we’re going to do is run two blockchains in parallel… with a way to transfer between both in a one-to-one ratio.”

Tech Objectives:

Ted gave some more insights on current projects and their goals.

“The Kinit beta is an example app of the way that you can integrate Kin into a digital service…. It’s a way for us to test user experience, test the technology… [use take the learnings to make Kin better, and take the learnings to other digital services developers.”

(Note: For more information on the ‘Kinit’ beta app, check out our latest post on Kin Contributors.)

“The Kik integration will probably happen in April or even early May. We want to use Kik to show the scalability of the blockchain… we think we’ll be able to show very soon, with evidence and data, that blockchain will scale with hundreds of thousands of users now, today. The way we’ll do this is integrating Stellar into Kik… and generating a bunch of transactions to test the Stellar blockchain. And we’ll be able to share those test results with you.”

Accountability:

“The deadlines we share with you are the same deadlines that we have internally…. and they’re purposely aggressive. What that means is that sometimes they’re going to slip. But it is very helpful to feel the pressure of the community to keep those commitments. Hold us accountable to those!”