The Kik mobile messaging service announced back in May 2017, that it would be launching a new cryptocurrency named Kin as the first step to developing its Kin ecosystem; a decentralized ecosystem of digital services.
Jump forward to September 2017 where Kik successfully concluded it’s token sale and raised nearly $100 million from across 117 countries.
Now — today, this decentralized ecosystem is truly underway as the company announced its approval of 40 developers to participate in its first ‘Kin Developer Program’.
But what is this and what will these developers do?
Kin Ecosystem
The chosen 40 developers will make applications that take advantage of the Kin cryptocurrency and once they successfully launch Kin-integrated apps over the next six months the developers will receive a financial incentive in the tune of $60,000 (or 400 million Kin).
The 40 applications will integrate the Kin Ecosystem Software Development Kit (SDK) into current existing apps. Areas of focus include
- messaging/chat space
- gaming
- productivity
- networking
- e-commerce
- content-sharing
- health
- education categories
Two examples are apps such as Nearby — a social networking app used to meet new friends, and Vent, an emotion-sharing platform.
Kik President Dany Fishel said in a statement:
“The Kin Developer Program allows us to harness the creativity of the global developer community to achieve our goal of becoming the most-used cryptocurrency in the world, […] We received proposals that plan to integrate Kin in new and exciting ways, and we are eager to work with these developers to build real consumer use cases of cryptocurrency.”
An Ecosystem of Digital Services
The goal for Kik is to use the Kin cryptocurrency as the basis of an ecosystem of digital services. Recently, the company signed a deal with Unity, to integrate Kin into the Unity Asset Store.
The hope now is to sign more partners similar to Unity which will expand the Kin ecosystem. The ideal scenario is, of course, a wider mainstream adoption of the cryptocurrency.
Featured image: Deposit Photos/ohmega1982
