Quote from: lovenlifelarge on May 27, 2018, 04:59:31 PM

do they have actual working product? many projects are just full of promise but cannot deliver what they promised, but anyway, I will dig on this one.

Here is the most recent update from Kin. They're extremely close to having a live working product. Everything as of right now is on the test net or in a private beta, but showing really positive results that everything is working as coming together as projected.

Hey, community.

Starting today, (Tuesday) and without promising (because promises tend to break), we'll share a weekly (or bi-weekly, more realistically) update on advancements that are going on here at Kin. We'll focus on three fields:

Blockchain developments
Ecosystem and SDK's
Standalone Kinit app

Without further ado, here's an update relevant for today - May 23rd.

Blockchain

The Blockchain Hackathon was successful and super fun! You can check out this post for more insights and details.
Our private net vs. Stellar's public net. We created our own test net environment (Horizon and Stellar core).

Why our own? We found a few issues and experienced an unstable environment when scale - testing on Stellar.

We added monitoring and alerting for Horizon and Stellar Core instances on DataDog and now we control our own test environment. We do not monitor Stellar's public test net anymore. Fork, remember?

ATN experiment. This is the core of it: ATN stands for attention. It's the Stellar scalability test AKA Kik's test where every message sent from a user's account reduces 1 ATN from his balance and every message received - adds 1 ATN to the user's balance. Reminder - this test started on Stellar's public test net and is now on our own private test net. Fork, remember?

The latest Kik's Android client version now points out to the private test net. Some current numbers and data:

Total of 23,210 unique accounts. All users are now on the private test net, from now will be referred to as the Kin Blockchain.
Peak daily transactions: ~470,000
Peak hourly transactions: ~30,000
Peak transactions per second: ~8.3
Total transactions count: 7,058,616
Successful transactions: 98% under 10 seconds
Moving forward, our goal is scaling. We will increase the number of users on the test to reach Stellar's highest bar (10 transactions per second). Another goal is to reach 1M transactions a day.

Standalone Kinit app

The beta app test phase 1 is now almost over and we can share some insights. The usage rates are much higher in comparison to other apps. While 90% of users abandon the app within first 30 days, only 43% abandoned Kinit within this period.

The users love the tasks. For example - 92% of users completed 2 tasks and over 75% completed 10 tasks.

Looks like the strategy to have one-two tasks per day has proved itself. The majority of users prefer doing one or two, feeling "it keeps them more engaged".

50% of those who earned enough Kin actually went ahead and made a purchase, while 84% of the others waited for other spend opportunities. Only 14% wanted to hold the Kin.

Users feel the app is innovative, fair and fun

Moving forward, the team will be adding earn opportunities such as 'do good', 'play a game', 'create content', as well as spend opportunities like a donation, digital assets, and tipping content.
Also moving forward, the private beta will continue with some new content experiments and later on - public beta with the intention of reaching a high volume of monthly active users.

Ecosystem

JWT (JSON Web Token) spec is live and can be found here. Here is the helper for partners to create the JWT and implement the SDK's
Digital Service onboarding - process documentation is in the works and can be found here. This documentation is (mostly) for the use of our partners, but you are more than welcome to take a look and learn about our work with them.
Digital services and partners can now create a native spend offer in their app. See the info here.

For those of you who aren't too technical, here's the important gist of it:

The client-side API allows digital service to add/remove "native spend" to marketplace UI. A callback will be called when a user taps a "native spend" cell in the marketplace.

The native offer will always be 1st in the Marketplace. The offer will have no capping or new offer flow, the digital service is responsible to remove "native spend" when completed, based on "native spend" own capping.

Future - biggest thing we're all waiting to hear news on - the Kik integration. The team is getting ready for Kik's team visit in TLV in June. The trip's goal is to work on timelines, align roadmaps and most important - work together on the integration and release of Kin in the Kik app.

Here is the original post on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/KinFoundation/comments/8li665/weekly_update_may_23/