July was a month when we saw the Kin token experience a slight revival. After a slow start which saw the price bottom out at $0,000119 USD/2 satoshi, Kin entered a period of growth which lasted a couple of days and led it to reaching the price of $0,000234 USD/3 satoshi at the time. KIN has since hovered around $0,000200 USD for a while before dropping off as August rolled in. Currently one KIN token can be purchased for $0.000156 USD (which is a 658% drop in the last 24 hours) or for 0,00000003 BTC (2,76% drop in the last 24 hours). A measly daily trade volume of 189 BTC is combined with a market cap of $117,035,961 USD, making KIN the 64th most valuable cryptocurrency in the world.
The token is a crucial element of the popular messaging app Kik’s intention to join the blockchain revolution. It is a Stellar Lumens fork that will be used on the Kin Marketplace, a playground where users will be able to perform various tasks handed out to them by this app in exchange for the token. The tokens can then be used as on-app payment means, and the platform will initially let users pay for various premium themes and customization tools for the Kik app with their Kin.
Thanks to Kinit, this coin’s use cases have been finally actualized. Kinit is an app that lets users earn Kin by completing surveys/tasks and then grants them access to the Kin Marketplace and where they have the opportunity to spend the Kin they earn on gift cards from brands and retailers like Amazon, AMC Theaters, and Google Play. The app also allows users to exchange their Kin tokens with other users. This is just the beginning apparently, as company claims that they plan on expanding the use cases of the Kin currency.
Kin also recently announced the Kin Developer Program which will focus on empowering developers to launch Kin-supported apps for their consumers.
“This inaugural program commits nearly $3M to up to 25 qualified developers who successfully create meaningful earn, spend, and peer-to-peer use cases for the Kin cryptocurrency in their apps. These select developers will have the individual opportunity to earn up to $140,000 USD in combined fiat and Kin currency, and they will have access to the Kin Ecosystem software development kit (SDK) and the Kin Playbook, a guide that provides information on successfully launching a Kin economy,” says a quote from their official announcement.
With this in mind, they plan on delivering several strong updates towards the end of the year, including full KIK integration on Android and EOS, full Kinit release on Android and EOS, atomic swaps technology, more than 25 integrated partners and a custom SDK developed in cooperation with Unity technologies.
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The latest development around the currency has been the announcement by Coinbase that they will be looking onto adding it onto their custody service. While they do mislabel it as Kik in their publication, Coinbase clearly feels that they could benefit from offering the holders of these tokens safe storage space.
Still, this piece of news immediately awakened the critics of the Kin cryptocurrency. Roger Ver’s Bitcoin.com calls it “pump and dump vaporware”; Meltem Demirors criticized the currency, claiming that it’s pointless, doesn’t have any real longevity and is simply an attempt of the Kik company to “tokenize their failing portfolio companies to sell to retail / dumb money to avoid a bagel on the balance sheet.” Mike Dudas posted the tweet below, trashing the project as well for its lack of purpose other than making its creators rich:
I wrote about @Kik and Kin earlier this week. It has no reason to exist other than that they were able to raise $100M to save a struggling company during the ICO boom. And that is distorting the blockchain developer marketplace https://t.co/KPQNd58Nc8 pic.twitter.com/iMASEYgSVc
— Mike Dudas (@mdudas) August 4, 2018
Most of the KIN community thinks that these are just baseless, “punching down” attacks on a project that is trying to bring something new to the table. In truth, KIN is just another ERC-20 token that isn’t doing anything much different from what Tron or similar projects are doing. For now things stand at that; it will be interesting to see if Kik/Kin deliver on their promises and if the users of this messaging app will be receptive of the fact that they will soon need cryptocurrency in order to purchase this one emoji they liked on the Kik Marketplace.
Considering that Kin has been in development for 6 years and underwent a very successful, 2.5 year beta test within the KIK app – this project has more promise than most other similar ones like it combined.