A Blueprint for ‘Crypto’ Mass Adoption: the Token-as-a-Service
How Kin will use infrastructure, incentives, and a platform of millions to spark the world’s first real digital economy.
Note: This is a Kin Foundation guest post contributed by our community member Dillon King.
If you’ve been following Bitcoin over the past few years, here’s a statistic that may surprise you. Despite regular explosions in popular awareness and market value, the world’s oldest and most adopted cryptocurrency is facing declining interest for its original use-case: Digital cash. Retailers of digital goods and services are walking away from Bitcoin en masse, and while this is partly due to wild volatility (less desire to spend), there’s more to the story. Bitcoin is a technology desperately in need of an upgrade. The incentive structure only rewards users that can afford powerful machines to run the network, the lengthy settlement time for each transaction renders a poor user experience for everyday life, and the fees are prohibitive to the sorts of micro-transactions that have taken industry verticals like gaming and live-streaming by storm.
And the world won’t wait for Bitcoin to catch up: Businesses of all shapes and sizes are pivoting to blockchain fundraising and tokenized services, and they’ve got billions of users that are ready (if unwittingly) to make the switch. But there are roadblocks. Expert talent is scarce, regulations are ever-tightening, and time is running out to establish an early mover advantage.
How can your business compete in a rapidly evolving climate?
For many, the answer will be tokenization provided as a service. Why front the costs and headaches required to develop a product that might not be ready in time, when you could work with a company that’s already done all of the heavy lifting for you?
Put yourself in the shoes of a consumer-facing digital service like Soundcloud or Tumblr. You’re failing to monetize with the options you have today: Targeted ads and subscription models, without the scale to support either. Imagine you could instead bring blockchain (the Web 3.0) into your app, in five minutes, with all of these features baked in:
- Monetize without damaging the user experience
- Powered by blockchains that actually support mass consumer scale
- Immediate exposure to an ecosystem of other apps and users
- Fully compliant with local regulations
- Access to custodian services that can manage your token earnings
- Robust backend services to track your data
- Expert staff ready to educate and support your blockchain transition
This is the concept behind Kin, the first crypto token-as-a-service for consumer apps to not only start from a multi-million user base, but to support it with a decentralized incentive protocol that rewards the generation of real economic activity.
Kin changes the game for developers that are tired of trying to compete with the monopolies at the top of their market (like Google and Facebook), who copy and crush them with sheer scale at every turn.
It specifically empowers platforms where digital content creators (Medium authors, for example) can finally be fairly compensated for the value they provide to other people on a daily basis. How?
- Simple opportunities for end users to earn
- (Effectively) no-fee micro-spending
- Incentives that demand as much consumer to consumer activity as possible
There’s just one catch: It’s not ready yet. But it’s getting damn close, and the Kin Foundation developers intend on hitting the first major milestone this year: making Kin the world’s most used cryptocurrency. That part is surprisingly easy, in a world where only an estimated six million people actively trade cryptocurrency, and nearly zero transact with it in their daily lives.
So, how will they get there?
Contrary to popular opinion in crypto trading circles, the path is not through big name exchange listings, crowdfunded advertising, transactions-per-second claims, or a whitepaper stuffed with PhDs. Those are nice to have, and they can send your coin up the rankings at coinmarketcap.com, but they don’t translate to real users participating in an economy. Users, and the network effect they produce, are the determining factor in the success of a digital economy.
To recap how far the Kin project has come since its inception in 2017, it’s worth reviewing the Foundation’s Highlights from Q1 2018. In short:
- The blockchain plan for consumer scale is in place
- Beta software is out and ready to scale up
- Platform and brand partners have come on board
- Respected third parties are helping to expedite conversations with exchanges, custodians and regulators
The next step is to integrate Kin inside of the Kik app, proving once and for all that blockchain is ready to scale to millions of daily users this year. The demand for an earning, spending, and sharing economy was previously demonstrated in the Kik app through the multi-year Kik Points experiment. Now, Kin will take a similar experience (branded earn/spend offers and a content marketplace) and prove that it can work even better using a blockchain.
“The points traded hands an average of 300,000 times per day, more than three times the average number of transactions per month on Bitcoin’s network during that time.” — Fortune
At just 300,000 real world transactions per day, the race is already over. Bitcoin and Ethereum may combine to produce one million ‘transactions’ per day, but nearly ALL of that activity goes to speculative trading, and most of the activity is concentrated in the hands of a few. It’s worth noting that, generally, the more a currency is earned and spent in the real world, rather than in speculative markets, the less volatile the price will be, as the majority of the price discovery then rests in the hands of everyday people that aren’t watching the exchange rate.
But Kin doesn’t stop there. It’s not just another one-app coin. Thanks to the developer incentives and five-minute SDKs for Android, iOS, Web, and the Unity game engine, Kin will be earned and spent in mainstream apps beyond Kik, starting later this year.
So… if it’s not a question of “if”, and the answer to “when” is “very soon,” there are only two questions that remain:
- How valuable would the Kin token be if it were the most used cryptocurrency — to developers, creators, and consumers?
- How many services will be encouraged to integrate Kin after the concept is proven at scale and the token-as-a-service model makes the process painless?
Only time will tell. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned after meeting members of the Kin Foundation in person, it’s that no organization is better positioned, or more dedicated, to proving that cryptocurrency is ready for its first mainstream consumer application.
