The Kin Ecosystem Foundation is launching the Kin Developer Program, an initiative that will offer up to 25 select developers an aggregate of approximately $3M in fiat currency and Kin for successfully launching their own Kin economies within their apps over a six-month period. The program aims to make it easy for any developer to build native experiences with Kin and will provide financial incentives for the most creative developers who expand the ecosystem.

If you’re a developer this is your opportunity to be one of the first to experiment with the SDK. Not only is there a financial incentive to participate, but you'll get cross promotion from the foundation in order to help jump-start your idea or even an app that you've already created. There are many more perks if you're selected. Take a look at the official site, blog post, and recent media coverage related to the program.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate for leave a comment!


Official Website:

https://kinecosystem.com/dev

Official Blog Post:

https://medium.com/kinblog/kin-developer-program-launches-today-f4f2822d4cf2

Media Coverage:

https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/11/kik-commits-3-million-to-developer-program-for-its-kin-cryptocurrency/

https://betakit.com/kiks-kin-foundation-investing-up-to-3-million-to-developer-program/

https://www.coindesk.com/kin-foundation-pledges-3-million-to-fund-projects-powered-by-its-token/

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/07/11/kik-is-giving-3m-to-developers-to-build-for-its-kin-cryptocurrency/

Scuds31091 is a part of the Kin Ambassador Program

Reimagining Value in the Digital World — Part 1

https://medium.com/kinfoundation/reimagining-value-in-the-digital-world-part-1-345e82748634


Reimagining Value in the Digital World — Part 2

https://medium.com/kinfoundation/reimagining-value-in-the-digital-world-part-2-61213ea5a192


Two part series by Alex Frenkel the VP of Product at Kin explaining how the digital world works today, what issues are at hand, and how Kin can revolutionize it.

Kin in Japan

After the recent Kin/Unity partnership announcement, Kin traveled to Tokyo for the Unity Conference to dive into the gaming scene and seeing exactly how Kin can best integrate into games and help developers monetize.

https://medium.com/inside-kin/kin-in-japan-112b2f57da2

Kin and Kik — Working Together

https://medium.com/kinfoundation/kin-and-kik-working-together-ac89bc55b82b

This was posted yesterday. It's a nice update on where the Kik integration of Kin stands right now.

"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."

What is Kin? | A New Business Model for Digital Services

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INI-SXXOV_0&t=5s

This was one of the first "coin reviews" I've seen where someone has actually done the research in order to know what they're talking about. This person talks about his own ideas of the positives and negatives of KIN. Although I may not agree with every point, you can tell he's done his research, and can backup why he feels how he does.

Live Q&A #6 with Ted Livingston, Kik Founder and CEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zuk2LPpHDRQ

The biggest news from the most recent AMA yesterday was that Kin is planning to peg the KIN token to a specific USD value within the Kinit App.

Just so you have some background. Currently beta users can earn Kin daily or every other day by completing earn opportunities within the Kinit App. They can take this Kin and purchase gift cards.

Thus, it sounds like Kin will choose a specific conversion rate for the Public Beta launch of their Kinit App in mid July. Kin could set the rate of a $10 gift card to cost 500 Kin. By doing so, they're setting the value of Kin to be $0.01. The company will be subsidizing any costs from this rate they set.

It's going to be really interesting to see what happens to the exchange market value of Kin once it has a comparable price within the app. If you can eventually spend your Kin at a $0.01 rate, then all the current Kin on the exchanges trading at $0.000150 will get eaten up very quickly. Ideally the price will shift towards matching the price set within the app.

Kin is set to launch within the Kik app as soon as the end of June (this month). It will also be releasing it's standalone app, Kinit, to the public in July.

With just the Kik integration alone, it's possible it will have more transactions a day than any other coin in the crypto space soon after integration. However, this is even more likely to happen before the end of the year as it's further integrated and especially once Kinit is generating transactions as well.

The "crypto community" is extremely small when compared to the mass consumers of digital apps in the world. KIN isn't trying to convince current crypto users to get on board, nor does it need to. KIN is focusing on the billions of consumers that use apps daily that will be using crypto for the first time. Kik alone has 300,000,000 users with about 15,000,000 active monthly. All it needs to do is get it's current user base earning and spending in KIN and it will become the most used crypto in the world.

KIN partners with IMVU

IMVU is The World’s Largest Avatar-Based Social Network

Users spend 55mins a day on it. They generate 15,000,000 transactions monthly spending 10,000,000,000 in their native currency.

50,000 of the users are creators and earn money by making virtual products and selling them.

One of the top grossing apps of the Google Play and Apple Store.

91% Year Over Year Growth on iOS

62% Year Over Year Growth on Andriod

6000 virtual products added to the site daily

Interesting Fact - 70% of users are females. 90% of crypto users are males. This will be a big shift in the crypto space once such a large female populate is introduced to and using cryptocurrency.

Source: https://medium.com/kinfoundation/imvu-and-kin-partner-to-deliver-native-crypto-experiences-in-3d-social-networks-3c1c8089172a

While your statement may have some truth to it, it's by no means the full story. Yes Kik was declining in users and losing it's placement among other chat apps. Yes, KIN was created as an option that could be beneficial to the company. Because of KIN, Kik no longer will have to rely on monetizing via ads or selling consumer data. They own 30% of the supply of KIN. Their main goal as a company is to make KIN as valuable as possible as they will reap benefits from doing so. Kik's fate is in the hands of Kin's success.

This does not mean that it is a "marketing play". They didn't just make an empty announcement in order to pump their stock and cash out on the crypto trend. They've been actively working on building this ecosystem over the last 9 months and have had this plan for years.

Do think these huge partners would get involved with a "marketing play":

Unity - Biggest Game Development Platform in the World

Blackhawk Incentives - Leading Global Stored Value and Payments Provider

IMVU - The World’s Largest Avatar-Based Social Network

Kin will not only exist within Kik. It's going to be integrated in many games via the Unity SDK, integrated within IMVU, and many more large scale partners that will continue to be announced. Not to mention the smaller apps and projects that decide to integrate as well.

Kik will eventually be just a small part of the entire ecosystem. Even if Kik failed to exist and closed it's doors, Kin would continue to thrive.

As you may or may not know, Kin forked Stellar's blockchain code as they ran into a few issues revolving around scaling to what they need in the near future. One of these issues was the need for lumens during wallet creation which would be very costly for Kik to cover for it's millions of users and also left the door open for malicious wallet creation. Another issue was it's transaction cap. Stellar is capable of processing many more transactions per second that it currently allows, but to combat spam they've implemented an arbitrary cap. This set's the ceiling at 10tx/s (transactions per second). It's likely the case that Stellar will increase this number themselves, but KIN will need it sooner than Stellar will make these changes, if they do. Running on a forked version of Stellar, they now have full control to make those adjustments at their own will.

Kin's initial test on the public Stellar testnet:

Daily Transactions: 220,000
Transactions per second: 3.6

Kin's initial test on the forked version of Stellar's blockchain (Kin Blockchain):

Daily Transactions: 470,000
Transactions per second: 8.3

Kin's 2nd test on the Kin Blockchain (increasing the amounts of users involved):

Daily Transactions: 1,200,000
Transactions per second: 20


Based on the last test results, the Kin Blockchain has proved it's scalability. It can successfully process 2x the transactions than the current Stellar blockchain (as-is) and can also process more transactions per second than Bitcoin (4-7tx/s) and Ethereum (13tx/s). Also keep in mind that when Bitcoin and Ethereum reach these kind of numbers they will experience extremely slow confirmation times and highly inflated fees. Kin will continue to push the limit of it's blockchain by increasing the number of users involved and ideally increasing the daily transactions and transactions per second even further.

Source: https://medium.com/inside-kin/scaling-kin-blockchain-status-update-ca4f323d3e99

New Acoin Block Explorer:

http://madmando.info/

A member of the telegram community just finished getting this up! This should be what you're looking for.

Here is the most recent Bi-Weekly KIN Update:


"It's time for our routine check-up, otherwise known as our bi-weekly update. You can find the previous one here, where we shared developments in our Blockchain, Ecosystem and Standalone teams.

It's been two weeks and although we didn't become the most used cryptocurrency (yet), some things have changed and improved.

 

Blockchain

ATN experiment: the experiment is going extremely well. The numbers, you can say, exceed our expectations. We feel confident in the scalability and stability of the blockchain infrastructure. We increased the number of users and in return, we saw growth in the number of transactions per day and per second.

I'm not sharing the specific numbers here because tomorrow (Thursday) we'll share a post explaining the ATN test with the most recent numbers. Stay tuned.

Also, in the past, we talked about the development of a swap mechanism (Kin1/Kin2). David - our senior software engineer was able to demonstrate in real time how the mechanism is structured and functions. Bottom line - he was able to show the teams how an ERC20 Kin token was converted to a Stellar KIn asset. Same here - a post is in the works.

Currently, we have 1 staging environment - the one that the ATN is based on. We're building a new staging for deeper internal research (for scalability and security) and also for external indie developer to "play with". Think of it as a playground that will enable testing our blockchain without the risk of interfering with the existing environment.

 

Ecosystem

Last week the Kik Chat product team came to Israel to work on the implementation of the SDKs in their app. Here's what the Kik team had to say on the trip:

"Everyone from Kik felt it was extremely productive and a great relationship builder. From a practical stand point we made a lot of progress on the integration and were able to put our plans down in writing, but what I’m most excited about was the progress we made in our communication and understanding each other (both our teams and processes). I’m confident it will result in more collaboration and openness, and will ultimately result in stronger product offerings from both Kik and Kin".

What's important is now both teams are aligned with next steps and specific product specs. I believe we'll be able to share more details on the integration in the next update.

 

Kinit

The product is now in its second private beta phase (on which you can read more here).

There are two main new features introduced in the app:

• Phone verification: now, users' data is attached to their account, which enables a creation of a backup tool and adds security layers to the app.
• Peer to Peer transactions: users can now send Kin to their friends (assuming both use the Kinit app). You can also reach out to our ambassadors who experience with the app and even used this functionality to send Kin to each other. Kudos.

The team is working on integrating and creating more earn and spend opportunities and making everything ready for the public beta - one you can all be part of.

 

I remember I said an explanation of the supply will be detailed in this update. However, we feel a separate post explaining the Kin allocation and supply is in order and such will be shared next week (between the two large-scale updates)."

Appreciate the follow up post. Ethereum has already passed bitcoin in daily/weekly/monthly transactions. I believe it's been like that for some time now.

I think the crypto world is going to be surprised how fast KIN transactions can grow to a number that starts to compete with the major chains and then pass them completely.

Let me know if you have any questions as you dive in deeper!

A few takeaways from the Kinit App update article:

https://medium.com/inside-kin/the-kinit-app-whats-next-aaf2dd6b8bce



Kinit Public Beta is set to go live Mid July 2018.

"On a business level, we are working with potential partners to provide either earn opportunities or spend offers.

As we learned from the private beta insights, earn opportunities must be available on a daily base and should include a variety of tasks. Therefore, we will go live with at least two partners that provide interesting earn opportunities for our users.

On the spend side, we already have Blackhawk Network joining our ecosystem and we are working hard with other potential partners to provide additional interesting spend offers.

On a technical level, we have three integrations to complete, Blackhawk Network and two more integrations with partners providing earn opportunities. If time will allow us, we will complete also an additional integration on the spend side.

Additionally, we are going to invest time in bug squashing to create a buttery smooth experience in the app. Simultaneously, there will be a range of technical aspects to overcome to be scalable at a rate necessary for all of our users and partners to work with.

On a product level, we are fine tuning user flows based on the beta results and placing some extra icing on top by creating awesome user experiences for the new features to come.

The second phase of the private beta will help with shaping the future of the Kinit app. According to the findings we will make sure the public beta will include the best features and experience for our users. We will share more details on this one in a separate post."

I have a feeling you didn't actually read the post you're referring to...

If you just read the headline (that was created for the sole purpose of bashing Kin), then you might actually believe what you just said. If you actually read the article, you would have noticed that even though Ted did make a similar comment, he wasn't referring to KIN as the headline makes you think. Ted is saying that blockchain technology isn't for everyone. It makes complete sense for projects like KIN that are trying to become the most used crypto in the world, but it might not make sense for every single industry to use blockchain as it's not always going to be a benefit.

KIN is far from failing. Just today they announced they're moving into the 2nd stage of their Private Beta for the Kinit app and will begin their Public Beta around the middle of July.

Source: https://medium.com/inside-kin/the-kinit-app-whats-next-aaf2dd6b8bce

That's correct. Kik Points was used to unlock new themes and smiles. Kin will also be used for the same purpose. However, they'll allow users to create their own themes and stickers to sell on the market. So instead of just Kik creating everything, the users will also be able to contribute. So if you create a great theme, and I want to use it in my chat group, I can go buy your theme with Kin and you will be paid the Kin. So the themes and smiles will turn into a consumer to consumer marketplace where you can earn and spend Kin. Also, they have plans for additional features that Kik Points was never used for.

I would watch this live presentation/demo of how Kin will be integrated into Kik. This will be way better and explaining how it will work.

https://medium.com/kinfoundation/kin-ambassadors-event-2018-kiks-product-team-on-integrating-kin-recap-3-c1c4580478c5

I'm not sure you can speak for "most users" on Kik then. I'm not just making a random guess. My post is based on years of hard evidence. When Kik Points was running in Kik from 2014-2016 it was seeing on average 3x as many transactions as Bitcoin was during the same period of time. I'm not sure you can really argue that as it's real data from Kik.



Kin is going to replace Kik Points within the Kik app and have even more usage and opportunities than Kik Points ever did. On top of that, unlike Kik Points, Kin isn't just tied to the Kik app. It's going to be integrated into 1000's of other apps. Some smaller, equal in size, or larger than Kik. However, with just Kik alone, based on hard data, it will become the most used crypto in the world (by transaction count) after it's fully integrated.

Thanks for your insight. I touched on the supply concerns a few times already. I don't see it as an issue. KIN is meant to have a low coin value as that's needed for clean micro transactions.

A 50x rise is a 50x rise. Doesn't matter if you going from $0.0002 to $0.01 or $200 to $10,000. In either scenario you're making the same amount of money in the end as an investor. The only difference is you'll have a larger quantity of the cheaper coin. The demand is typically the key to the equation.

I would suggest looking at the product/idea when you can't rely on the general market momentum and trends.

For example, KIN may be integrating their coin into Kik's chat app as soon as this month. Once fully integrated, this will make KIN the most used crypto in the world... I would imagine that could lead to a coin rising in any type of market situation.