Just over a year after launching Kin, Kik announced a series of new features to drive adoption of its cryptocurrency.
Specifically, Kik’s users will now have more opportunities to earn Kin and spend it on new chat themes and customized chat screens through the Kin Marketplace Beta, which is the company’s central location for Kin experiences.
Last month, The Kin Foundation, Kik’s non-profit governance body overseeing the Kin cryptocurrency, announced that it will build its own blockchain based on Stellar due to challenges with the load times and fees on Ethereum. The chat theme experiences are the first to run on the Kin blockchain.
A sample of approximately 1,000 Kik users will be able to earn Kin by completing tasks including a tutorial, quizzes, and polls. Users will earn a preset amount of Kin based on the complexity level of the tasks, which will then give users access to premium chat themes.
“With these new experiences, we want to demonstrate how simple and seamless cryptocurrency-driven experiences can be.”
“Our goal is to make Kin the most used cryptocurrency in the world and getting Kin into the hands of more Kik users is a critical step in achieving this,” said Ted Livingston, founder and CEO of Kik and Kin. “Blockchain is a new and complex technology, but consumers don’t have to understand the technology in order to use it. With these new experiences, we want to demonstrate how simple and seamless cryptocurrency-driven experiences can be.”
Livingston announced Kin in May 2017, with the goal of creating a transactional cryptocurrency that serves as a foundation for a decentralized ecosystem of digital services. At the time, Livingston expressed his dedication to combining payments and chatbots, calling payments “the missing piece” to making bots successful.
Kik’s chat app has always been a key part of incentivizing people to adopt Kin; recently, the company announced a partnership with Hawk Incentives, which builds gift cards and e-codes for corporates looking to boost participation. Hawk Incentives’ API will be integrated directly into Kin’s SDK, allowing Kik’s digital services partners to provide Kin “spend” offers to users directly through their own applications.
Last month, the company announced that Kin achieved 1.2 million transactions a day at a rate of 20 transactions a second.
Kik said it plans to scale Kin-powered experiences to more users, and continue working towards introducing a creator marketplace that allows users to create content that can be accessed with Kin.
The Kin Marketplace Beta and Kin are currently available in Kik for Android devices.