In an announcement yesterday, the mobile messaging app Kik revealed it has already raised $50 million from investors to launch its new “Kin” token, adding that it intends to raise a further $75 million in a public token distribution (ICO) to be held in September.
Investors believe the Kin token will boost the value of Kik and they’re putting millions of dollars in to back the idea for the Kin token.
Until later in September the ICO has been private and only open to institutional investors including Blockchain Capital, Pantera Capital and Polychain Capital.
According to Coindesk, Kik intends to use the token for its already popular Kik bots platform within its app as well as implementing a Kin Rewards Engine which will have the goal of enabling any consumer application to financially reward end-user actions within KIK.
“One of the areas of immediate opportunity is the over 100,000 bot developers, who have created over 180,000 bots. Those bots could be anything from entertainment to content creation to games,’ Tanner Philp, a manager of special initiatives at Kik told Coindesk.
Kik told CoinDesk that functionality could be used to pay someone in Kin to watch a live stream or to reward end-users for hosting content “We view successful integrations of kin to be two-sided marketplaces where users can earn and spend,” Philp said.
Kik claims 15 million monthly active users, about 60 percent of whom are in the 13 to 24 age demographic.
Kin is based on the Ethereum blockchain network and is ERC-20 compliant. As such it will be possible for exchanges to list the token for trading, and allow redemption into fiat U.S. dollars. You can join the Kik ICO by signing up to the Kin website by September 9th but a forewarning they require your U.S. ID to participate which includes your social security number. Registering means would-be investors will be ‘white-listed’ and able to take part in the sale by sending Ethereum to the dedicated Kin ICO address on September 12th.
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