Kin gives all applications and brands the ease of creating exciting experiences and rewarding users with cryptocurrency, all this while generating new monetization streams for themselves.
Kin is a utility token designed for users to earn for their contributions to platforms and spend within the ecosystem. Web and mobile app developers also earn weekly rewards based on the level of interaction their users provide to the economy of this ecosystem. By doing this, Kin creates a powerful business model for developers and users, who are rewarded for their time online.
The platform is also integrated into more than 50 Mobile Applications, Web and video games and is the most held token in Solana, after SOL. The ecosystem also has more than 9 million unique holders and 1.8 million monthly active users, which represents more than 20% of all active wallets on Solana, and continues to grow.
Project history
KIN was launched at the end of 2017 with a very clear vision: offer end-user applications a new way to monetize their creations, by rewarding its users instead of collecting and exploiting their data.
The project was initially developed using two technologies – Stellar and Ethereum. In Ethereum in an ERC-20 token, while in Stellar the operations for social interaction and the deployment of the platform were developed. However, due to the lack of scalability of Ethereum and Stellar, it was decided to abandon this blockchain and migrate completely to Solana. Today, Kin lives exclusively on the Solana blockchain, which offers the high speeds required to build the best cryptocurrency-based experiences for users.
Kin's mission is to transform the web: many web and mobile applications today exploit user data in order to monetize it. For example, social networks collect and sell users' private data. As users engage more with the experiences offered by Kin, developers are rewarded by the Kin Rewards Engine.
With this idea, users not only earn rewards for creating content, but also for consuming it. This vision is reflected in another similar project Basic Attention Token (BAT), however Kin has a larger audience and much more variety of use cases.
With the start of development, the KIN Foundation, which is in charge of the project and its development, while promoting the adoption of this technology and encouraging it to reach new projects and applications.
How does KIN work?
The KIN project is divided into three parts:
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- A high-speed blockchain based on Solana: On it, all social activity of the ecosystem applications takes place.
- utility token: Users and developers earn Kin tokens based on their contributions to the ecosystem and can then spend them within the platform.
- Kin Rewards Engine: The core of Kin is the rewards engine, which pays web and mobile app creators a weekly reward for app usage. This is a powerful incentive model that encourages platform owners to adopt the token in their app and create a valuable new revenue stream for themselves.
The strategy behind it is to remove the complexity for developers to create applications based on cryptocurrencies. Developing with blockchain technology is inherently complex. Kin makes it easy by offering:
- The developer community has a powerful SDK and various open source tools, which allow developers to build web or mobile apps using coding languages they are familiar with (for example, Android, iOS, Unity). There is also a No-Code SDK where people can build apps using visual tools.
- Kinetic: It is a set of powerful open source tools that help create the user experience within applications. It has many functionalities, for example, instead of confusing new users with blockchain fees, Kinetic allows developers to pay these fees in the background so that the user experience can focus on creating fun experiences with the Kin token. Additionally, it provides many diagnostic tools that allow developers to optimize their cryptocurrency integrations.
KIN Rewards (KRE), rewarding users
The KIN Rewards or KRE, are a reward system that is intended for application developers within the KIN ecosystem. The rewards consist of a "Daily Payout", which can reach 250.000.000 KIN, which is distributed among all the developers within the platform.
Developers can increase your share of daily pay, encouraging its users to earn and spend KIN.
Also, those developers who create the highest user demand and usage for KIN will receive the highest daily rewards.
To prevent this dynamic from creating a monopoly, controls are in place to promote fairness for newer and smaller applications.
The KIN Rewards system follows some very simple principles, among which we have:
- Equity: All promoters are measured by the same metrics.
- Effectiveness- Payments have been streamlined to be as fast and smooth as possible.
- Transparency: the KRE formula is public and easy to understand.
- Equal opportunities: all promoters can participate and be rewarded by the KRE.
This is clearly reflected in the application subscription system to the KRE rewards program. To do this, developers just need to create some means of integration and interaction with the KIN network. At that point, they must register the application in the portal of KRE Developers Portal, and once the registration is finalized and approved by the KIN team, you will be able to deploy the application and be part of the KRE rewards program.
Kinetic, deploying services within KIN
Kinetic is a open source toolkit that facilitate the creation of applications for the KIN ecosystem with a high integration with the Solana network. The goal of these tools is to offer developers everything they need so that their applications can take advantage of Solana's full capabilities.
For example, Kinetic provides a consistent and clean abstraction on top of the Solana SDKs and the improvement with some features commonly requested such as paying Solana fees on behalf of the user, tracking and timing user transactions, and sending webhooks.
Kinetic is aimed at developers who want build crypto-experiences for users of your application, hiding many of the details about the blockchain out of sight for the end user experience.
Moreover, Kinetic is an all-in-one tool. Not only does it enable cryptocurrency experiences to be generated, but it brings that power to platforms as varied as PCs, the Web, and smartphones, reducing the workload on developers when deploying applications that use its capabilities.
KIN Tokenomics
The supply of tokens is 10 trillion (10.000.000.000.000), all of them created in 2017.
KIN Foundation sold 10% of the total supply in two pre-sales in 2017. The first, a private pre-sale in which 487,8 million tokens were placed, and the second, a public pre-sale, where 512,2 million tokens were sold.
In addition, the company Kik Interactive received 3 billion tokens (30% of total supply), at a rate of 300.000 billion tokens quarterly for 10 quarters. The rest of the issue, 60%, is under the control of the KIN Foundation.
This set of tokens is divided into two groups:
- KIN 4,5 trillion for the rewards.
- KIN 1,5 trillion to cover operating and marketing costs.
The issuance of the former is subject to an annual budget process established in the whitepaper, with a maximum of 20% of the current balance managed by the KIN Foundation. There are additional rules in the whitepaper for how the funds can be spent. Any unspent budget is returned to the reserve at the end of the year and forms part of 20% of the following year. In this way, the treasury reserve will continue in perpetuity. At the end of each year, the foundation publishes a Transparency Report for the Kin community detailing the spending of the tokens within the rules of the whitepaper.
Currently, KIN has a circulating issue of more than 2 billion tokens KIN in the market.
Applications within KIN
The KIN ecosystem has already exceeded 50 applications. Most of them focus on social networks, the main protagonist being the Kik messaging app.
However, KIN applications have diversified and now we can find games like Kreechures (based on NFT) or apps focused on DeFi such as raydium.
To learn more about its vibrant ecosystem of Kin apps, we can visit its application library.