$KIN - 5-10 Year HODL

KIN Current Price 21/1/21

KIN Current Price: $ 0.00004056
1MM (1,000,000) Kin: $ 40.56

What is KIN?

Kin is a digital currency. It can be earned and spent across an entire ecosystem of applications. Kin is designed to be accessible by a broad mainstream audience, computer illiteracy is not required. By bringing together developers and users of all kinds to build in a shared new digital economy, KIN can create a more fair playing field; one in which the developers and content creators that build these virtual realities are rewarded based on their contributions, not harvested for their personal data and attention against their will.

How was Kin distributed at launch and how does it enter circulation?

The Kin Foundation sold 1 trillion (10% of total supply) in a token distribution event in September 2017 that was split between a pre-sale (487.80 billion sold) and a public sale (512.20 billion sold). Half of the tokens sold during the pre-sale (244 billion) were subjected to a one-year lock-up period. Kik received 3 trillion tokens (30% of total supply), which vested at a rate of 300 billion tokens quarterly for 10 quarters, and the Kin Foundation received 6 trillion (60% of total supply). The Kin Foundation tokens will be distributed through the Kin Rewards Engine, which divides the allocation between network participants and marketing and operational costs for the Kin Foundation (6 trillion Kin has been split into 4.5 trillion for network participants, and 1.5 trillion for marketing and other operational costs of the Kin foundation). Kin Foundation tokens for network participants are schedule to be distributed to the network at a rate of 20% of the remaining balance per year.

What is the Kin Rewards Engine?

Kin is used as money within a digital ecosystem of consumer applications and services. Kin coins enter circulation via an incentive model referred to as the Kin Rewards Engine, or "KRE", which rewards the developers that create compelling user experiences with Kin based on their engagement. This offers a software monetization model that incentivizes the adoption of new use cases and creation of value for a cryptocurrency, as well as encouraging the exchange of value between users, as opposed to harvesting user data and attention at no benefit to users themselves. This new alternative re-aligns users and developers around a shared digital economy in which the content creators and developers that generate value are the focus, not big-data monopolies.

The distribution and algorithmic logic of the Kin Rewards Engine is overseen by the Kin Foundation, a non-profit organization based out of Ontario, Canada. Undistributed Kin is held in an institutional-grade treasury that is controlled via a series of vesting periods, inflation guidelines, and fiduciary custody controls that ensure the safe transfer and proper use of funds. Anti-spam and anti-fraud assurances are also provided as a service until such time that the distribution of Kin can be fully automated with those additional safeguards in place. No more than 10 trillion Kin will ever exist by the end of the distribution period, the large supply meant to allow mass adoption by users around the world while still transacting in whole-number denominations, as opposed to decimal places.

$KIN Blockchain Usage Metrics (21/1/21)

Monthly $KIN Stats - https://kin.org/stats/
Monthly Active Spenders (MAS): 1,540,227
Monthly Active Earners (MAE): 2,899,430

All Time $KIN Stats - https://public.tableau.com/profile/kinfoundation#!/
Total unique spenders all time: 25,311,648
Total unique earners all time: 46,000,343

KIN has Already Beat the SEC

Although the Kin Foundation was not targeted by the SEC lawsuit, its proximity to Kik led to on-going uncertainty around its future.

This cloud of uncertainty led many in the market to wonder: Will the Kin Foundation survive a potential Kik legal defeat? Could Kik afford a penalty? Will the SEC target Kik’s assets (including the Kin it owns)? Will the SEC label Kin as a security? Can developers continue to use Kin in their apps? Could Kin be prevented from being listed on exchanges?

Following a mutually agreed settlement with the SEC, this uncertainty has dissipated, and the the above questions are answered as $KIN has a positive future ahead.

TDLR: Kik is going to be OK. Beyond the monetary fine, Kik’s assets are still Kik’s property, including its remaining treasury, its Kin reserves, and all of its intellectual capital. With this settlement Kik is able to continue active development on the open source Kin SDK and their new wallet app, Code.

Concurrently, the future of the Kin Foundation is not adversely affected. The SEC has not asked to register Kin as a security, and didn’t impose trading restrictions on it. Prior to this settlement there had been questions from exchanges if they could list Kin which hindered Kin’s ability to get on top tier exchanges. The judge’s ruling in the case and the terms of the settlement make it clear that the Kin cryptocurrency is not in violation of any securities law and should be free to trade on exchanges.

Over the last two years, one of the unfortunate outcomes of this legal battle has been a continuous erosion of Kin’s value which made it difficult for Kin to derive a fair market valuation, based on the real economic activity of the Kin ecosystem. Despite these legal headwinds, the Kin Ecosystem was able to develop and grow into an ecosystem of millions of users spending Kin across dozens of independent apps every month.

Current Project Activity

The reserves that fund the Kin Rewards Engine (KRE) are intact and deep, the Kin Foundation will continue to use them to grow and reward its ecosystem players according to the economic activity and value generated.

New Executive Director Alim Khamis joined the Kin Foundation last year.

The migration to Solana is proceeding on-schedule. New and existing apps will be able to swap SDKs in early December, and there is also a plan for migrating older Kin token users to Solana-based Kin. This migration is nearing completion.

Its online community is strong and supportive, demonstrated by the growing number of services build by independent entrepreneurs

Increased user generated demand for Kin, at 108% growth month to month.

The https://kin.org/ website is continuously getting updated alongside high quality blog posts on Medium.

With the recent SEC resolution there is an open path for $KIN to be listed on new exchanges where it couldn’t be listed previously.

KIN Token History

KIN1: First generation of Kin running on Ethereum

KIN2: Second generation of Kin running on Stellar (non-mainnet).

KIN3: Third generation of Kin running on Stellar (non-mainnet), where Kin is the base asset.

KIN4: Fourth generation of Kin running on Solana (mainnet). Migration is complete.

KIN Board of Directors

- Executive Chairman William Mougayar, Former Ethereum Foundation Special Advisor.

- Executive Director Ted Livingston, Founder of Kin. Ted is also the Canadian founder of Kik Interactive, a messaging app that gained one million users in 15 days when it launched in 2010, well before rivals like Facebook Messenger got off the ground. By the time Tencent, the Chinese internet giant, invested $50 million in the summer of 2015, Kik was valued at $1 billion. Then, in 2017, Livingston made a fateful decision. Rather than raising more VC money, he launched an ICO, selling off Kin tokens for more than $100 million.

Livingston recently sold off Kik to MediaLab, which operates Whisper and other apps. He’s all-in on kin, even though few apps transact in the cryptocurrency these days, and only one mid-sized exchange lists it. Meanwhile, Livingston spent what remained of his cash pile fighting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which continued to crack down hard on the excesses of the 2017 run-up. The SEC said Kin was a security and that Kik broke the law in hosting an unregistered token sale. Livingston says the SEC is wrong and he’s efforts were rewarded because Ted was correct.

- Executive Director Alim Khamis joined the Kin Foundation last year. Alim began in large scale crypto mining, after which he joined several blockchain startups in leadership, strategy, operational, or advisory roles. In addition to teaching in the Blockchain Development Program at George Brown College, he also play a lead role in organizing the DeFi Toronto community with his fellow co-founders and has actively contributed to research with a chapter on Token Economies being published in a compendium later this year.

- Non-Executive Director Matt Hannam, experience in the legal and commercial fields, having advised leading financial institutions, hedge funds, public companies and blockchain projects in Australia, the UK and Europe.

KIK Board of Directors
Why are they important? Remember, Kik owns 30% of the supply of $KIN, 3 trillion coins. These are just a few of the board of directors for Kik.

- Ted Livingston

- Fred Wilson is also board member of Coinbase He currently is also a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and also founded Flatiron Partners. Fred has a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

- Sam Spadafora, Sam is an Angel Investor and Chairman of Kik Interactive. Sam currently serves on the Boards of MetaIntell, Penguin Computing, Infogain and as Chairman of Petzila. In the past he served as Chairman and CEO of Chordiant Software and Chairman of Chegg and served on the Boards of several private and public companies.

Sam has more than 30 years of high-technology management experience and a proven track record in successfully developing early-stage companies. Before joining Chordiant, Sam was Sun Microsystems Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations for the microelectronics business.

He was responsible for customer and OEM relationships, field sales and marketing, customer engineering and service in support of the SPARC, Java processor and Java embedded consumer product lines. During that time, he led the growth of a worldwide customer base and increased industry acceptance of SPARC and Java-based technologies and revenues.

Sam also served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Field Operations for the Santa Cruz Operation. He was also previously a key executive for Altos Computer Systems where he was Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing and Memorex Corp. where he was Vice President of U.S. sales operations

- Anamitra Banerji, Prior to product roles, Anamitra worked as a software engineer in the enterprise space for 4 years. He also co-founded an internet-healthcare company during the '98-'00 boom-bust. Anamitra joined Twitter in March 2009 as its first product manager and employee number 30. He helped start the company's advertising platform and core revenue engine, leading the team that launched the first monetization products, including promoted tweets, promoted accounts and promoted trends.

Along with his EIR responsibilities, Anamitra is also helping to launch Widescope, an early-stage experiment at Stanford focused on online collaboration. The website (http://widescope.stanford.edu ) encourages the community to find a solution to reduce the federal budget deficit and seeks to build consensus by allowing members to vote on submitted ideas. Anamitra is a mentor at 500 Startups—Dave McClure's accelerator program—where he advises a number of startups. Anamitra has earned an MBA from Cornell University and a degree in Electronics Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur, India.

- Adam Ludwin, is the co-founder and CEO of Chain. Chain builds the cryptographic ledgers that underpin breakthrough financial products. Prior to Chain, Adam was an investor at RRE Ventures in New York. He began his career as a consultant with The Boston Consulting Group and IDEO. Adam holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S. from UC Berkeley.

- Paul Holland, General Partner at Foundation Capital, Paul currently serves on the board of directors for Averail, CalStar Products, Coverity, InsideView, and Serious Energy; and previously for Talking Blocks (acquired by Hewlett-Packard), RouteScience (acquired by Avaya), TuVox (acquired by West) and Ketera (acquired by Rearden Commerce). Paul is an active board observer at Chegg and MobileIron.

Prior to joining Foundation Capital, was senior vice president of worldwide sales at Kana Communications, a leading supplier of Enterprise Relationship Management solutions to strategic e-businesses. Paul went on to build a team of over 350 people that secured more than 900 customers worldwide, helping Kana become one of the top ten IPOs of 1999. Before Kana, Paul was a vice president and general manager for another highly successful start-up, Pure Software, helping raise their market value from $2 million to over $1 billion in his five-year tenure there. He began his professional career at SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute).

Why do I like $KIN?

Fuck Facebook.

What are the Kin Foundation’s main goals after joining Solana?

One of the key benefits of the Solana chain is to provide the transaction speeds and capacity needed to keep up with the growth/scale of the Kin ecosystem. This means that user experience will not be compromised at the expense of choosing to use a blockchain infrastructure. The fact the Kin team have managed to pull off so many migrations with minimum problems gives me great confidence in their technical ability.

When will Kin start a big marketing push (it has been very quiet)?

Now the SEC case has been put behind the project this process is imminent.

What is the strategy to get on-board more Apps / Devs?

The new SDK built by Kik Inc and the upcoming move to Solana will make it easier for apps to integrate Kin. One of the priorities for the incoming KF Executive Director is to build on the existing work and incentive structure to bring new apps into the ecosystem.

What is the strategy to on-board more exchanges?

The SEC situation has made it difficult for other exchanges to list Kin. Now we have clarity on this issue I can see Kin getting listed on exchanges this year.

What impact do you think buy modules will have? (what kind of upside pressure will it have)

The buy module will unlock new ways for users to acquire Kin, driving positive dollars bought. It is too early to tell what the user adoption will be but the goal of the KRE Buy Track is to create a strong incentive for developers to drive this behavior.

When will most apps have buy modules working?

There has been work with several module partners for this integration, and we expect this work to continue with the arrival of the Kin Foundation Executive Director.

Are Devs developing new ways to increase buy demand?

Developers are increasingly engaging in the buy track of the Kin Rewards Engine. 7 of the top 10 apps by MAS currently have ads implemented. The Kin Rewards Engine is the incentive driver for developers to continue to evolve. The Kin Foundation, in collaboration with developers, is also working on KRE 3.0. One of the goals of KRE 3.0 is to have a positive impact on the amount of buy demand generating activity.

Who is currently paying the KF bills?

The Kin Foundation pays its own bills. So far these expenses have been funded via a loan from Kik. You can learn more about this in the Kin Foundation Transparency Report.
https://kin.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Kin-Foundation-Transparency-Report-2020.pdf

Does Agora make Kin truly blockchain agnostic?

That is a design goal. But as we all know, switching blockchains is not as simple as turning on/off a software module. That said, it is our objective to maintain the competitiveness of the Kin infrastructure and unburden every app in the ecosystem from having to think about it. A benefit of migrating to Solana is that it runs on the same elliptic curve as the current Kin Blockchain which means that all public/private keypairs can be replicated. This is a fundamental difference from the migration from Ethereum which required new public and private keypairs.

Is Solana at risk with the SEC?

The target of the SEC case was solely the initial sale and distribution of Kin by Kik Inc. Ultimately we can’t comment on any dealings that Solana has had with the SEC, but we can say that they have not made us aware of such risk.

When will more details be revealed about Code?

Code is being worked on by Kik Inc. Like the rest of the public we have limited insight into their plans as they are a private corporation and they believe that keeping their plans private will be important to the success of Code.

Examples of how the Kin Rewards Engine will generate growth

1. Supercell, a mobile gaming company, is looking for a way to get more players to buy their in-game currency, Gems. Supercell sees that if they accept KIN as a form of payment for Gems, they could generate 25% of the KIN economy's total daily transaction volume, meaning they would collect 25% (roughly) of the KIN Rewards Engine payout every day.
2. Supercell decides it's totally worth implementing KIN, and that they should drive as much KIN transaction volume as possible to increase their KRE payout. So, they begin offering Gems at a 30% discount to players who buy with KIN instead of dollars.
3. Players who didn't know about KIN are now incentivized to get some, and start using it to get cheaper Gems. They'll download the KIN Standalone Wallet to manage their balance, and find new earn/spend opportunities that they didn't know about. They'll participate in other services to earn KIN so they can buy more Gems.
4. The KIN economy grows. The service and the client were both incentivized to participate.

Or, another example:

1. Fiverr, a freelance marketplace, sees that if their freelancers accept KIN as payment, they can generate 10% of the KIN economy's total daily transaction volume, meaning they would collect 10% (roughly) of the KIN Rewards Engine payout every day.
2. Fiverr decides they'll give their freelancers the option of accepting KIN as payment, and that they should drive as much KIN transaction volume as possible to increase their KRE payout. So, they offer freelancers a % cut of their daily KRE reward, paid in KIN.
3. The freelancers see this as an opportunity to earn extra money on top, so they too want all of their customers to pay with KIN instead of dollars. They offer a 5% discount on their service for people paying with KIN.
4. Fiverr customers who didn't know about KIN are now incentivized to get some, and start using it to save money on their Fiverr services. They'll download the KIN Standalone Wallet to manage their balance, and find new earn/spend opportunities that they didn't know about. They'll participate in other services to earn KIN so they can buy more Fiverr services.
5. The freelancers now have the option of keeping the KIN they earned and watching it grow, or cashing out to dollars on an exchange. They will download the KIN Standalone wallet to manage their balance, and find new earn/spend opportunities that they didn't know about. They'll participate in other services to earn even more KIN.
6. The KIN economy grows. The service, the freelancer, and the client were each incentivized to participate.

The Rewards Engine is what truly sets KIN apart from other cryptocurrencies. It rewards contribution and participation in the economy, rather than rewarding people simply for being rich. Other cryptocurrencies reward whoever can afford the most powerful mining machines or whoever owns a large number of coins. Instead, KIN will reward the people who help drive demand and grow the value of the KIN economy.

This economic model has never been attempted before, not even in crypto. Most cryptocurrencies incentivize adoption and growth simply by developing great technology and generating hype. Instead, the KIN model will result in growth via incentivized participation. It will also result in widespread, mainstream adoption by offering other companies explicit rewards for bringing cryptocurrency into their products.

Touching on the 10 Trillion Coin Supply

With 10 trillion coins to be circulated means that KIN is positioned to be an actual “currency” with utility and value across a broad spectrum of uses and people groups. It is obviously an aggressive stance, an aggressive position for the Foundation, and can have an effect on the success or failure of the token.

First off, with this many tokens, it’s obvious that the design was to keep the currency cheap for longer, and to avoid the “Bitcoin Bulge.” They don’t want KIN to ever be a $17,000 Coin, and I get that.

But what they didn’t foresee is the flood of cash rushing into the space by hundreds of millions of crypto-hungry investors screaming “shut up and take my money!” And looking for the next huge blow up.

They see KIN on CoinMarketCap, priced at about 1/10th of a cent. They click on the website—OH, I’ve heard of KIK, my neighbor’s kid is on that! And they realize that for every dollar they invest, they’re going to get about 1,000 tokens... okay, so they jump thru the hoops, click and buy. Suddenly, the next day, the price is up, and the coin has crept up CMC.

And the next few thousand newbies see KIN. They see the price, and the name, and the movement... and they invest.

And suddenly, Ted Livingston’s nightmare is starting to come true... as millions of people buy billions of coins, suddenly, it seems like a stretch to call it a “micro” coin. Suddenly, CMC says the space is worth 1.4 T USD, and KIN is $70B of that. Perhaps a “name,” a company we’ve all heard of and used the products of, announces an integration with KIN to their platform. And another does the same. You look up and KIN is worth $150B. Then $200 B. Bitcoin is worth $900B, because it’s bitcoin, and Ethereum is worth $500B. But KIN is climbing right along.

These are the unintended consequences of a 10 T coin supply. The intention was to keep the price low... but what if the effect is the exact opposite?

For example, Bitcoin was designed and engineered to be the “money of the future.” People would use bitcoin to buy everything from groceries to a cup of coffee to a new house. How has that worked out? BTC is no longer a currency, in a very real sense. It’s become more or a benchmark store of wealth. The unwieldy nature of the BTC blockchain makes transactions more cumbersome and expensive with each passing day. BTC is more like gold bullion... and can you buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks with gold bullion?

KIN is set on a course to be one of the few surviving cryptos of this chaotic birth phase of the space. The designers tried to set it up so that it would remain inexpensive by setting a high token number, and by giving so much of it away. I think some significant things will happen, however, assuming the currency survives and grows, and the use cases and partnerships actually materialize.

1. I believe the nominal value of KIN was designed to be about $1. This makes sense, as most users of the KIK platform can easily relate to this value and easily assign value to good and services using the Dollar.
2. I believe that once the entirety of the KIN token supply is in circulation, the value of KIN will begin to rise precipitously, as users use and spend their tokens.
3. I believe that the compounding effect of low price, growing ROI and millions of new entrants into crypto will create a “buying frenzy” that will slingshot the price of KIN. The FOMO factor can be multiplied many times by the experience level (rather the lack of) of the buyer, the name brand surface quality attached to KIN and the sheer numbers of coin people can buy.
4. this “feeding frenzy” tipping point may come much sooner than anyone thinks— exchanges are experiencing ATH enrollments and usage and are collapsing under the load. They are upgrading servers and capacity as quickly as they can, yet the number of customers, all eager to buy crypto, still climbs. We have already seen a $1 T crypto market multiple times.

The mainstreaming of crypto is STILL in its infancy; many people still think Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme. This is a unique coin, with unique properties. And we are in below the ground floor. Succeed or fail, strap in, because it’s going to be ride.

The groundwork has already been done, the foundations are set, this investment is far less riskier than what is was 3 years ago. /r/SatoshiStreetBets > /r/WallStreetBets.

My Price Prediction

$0.01 January 21/1/2025
-> $40 would be $10,000
-> $1000 would be $250,000
$0.10 January 21/1/2030
-> $40 would be $100,000
-> $1000 would be $2,500,000