Kin Ecosystem Foundation, the nonprofit governance organization for the Kin cryptocurrency, today announced it has approved 40 developers as participants in its first Kin Developer Program.
Those developers will make applications that take advantage of Kin, a cryptocurrency created by the Kik mobile messaging service. The developers who successfully launch Kin-integrated apps over the next six months will receive financial incentives worth up to $60,000 (or 400 million Kin).
The foundation received more than 200 applications from developers in 38 countries. Of the submissions accepted into the program, approximately 40 percent of proposed use cases plan to integrate Kin by adding a new feature into an existing consumer app. Two such apps are Nearby, a popular social network for meeting new friends, and Vent, an emotion-sharing platform at the forefront of its field.
“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,” said Kik president Dany Fishel in a statement. “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.”
Kik launched the cryptocurrency in September, raising almost $100 million from the token sale. And now Kik, through the Kin Ecosystem Foundation, is signing deals with partners to make its cryptocurrency broadly available. The foundation created a software development kit (SDK) that makes it easy to incorporate Kin into a game or app.
Kik’s goal for Kin is to create an ecosystem of digital services, and the company cut a deal with Unity to integrate Kin into the Unity Asset Store. As more partners like Unity join and expand the ecosystem, Kik and Kin will drive mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency.
As new partners come aboard, Kin will launch the Kin Rewards Engine (KRE), which can incentivize developers to create valuable digital services for users in the Kin Ecosystem Foundation. This will allow them to make a fair return based on the number of users of their services. Through the KRE, daily rewards will be distributed to developers based on their contribution to the entire ecosystem.
A selection committee composed of Kin executives and team members chose submissions based on the nature of the suggested use case, experience, skills, and background of the team or individual applying, and the likelihood of reaching the program’s milestones.
The 40 projects will integrate the Kin Ecosystem SDK into new and existing apps, spanning the chat, gaming, productivity, networking, ecommerce, content-sharing, health, and education categories.
All participants will attend an educational, web-based kickoff session, and they will be supported by the Kin developer team throughout the program. Apps must be ready for presentation during a virtual demo day on Oct. 2 in order for developers to receive their first incentive of 50 million Kin (value of $7,000). The total incentive is worth $115,000 (a combination of Kin and fiat currency), and the first payout is worth $22,000 (a combination of Kin and fiat currency).
Kin will continue to expand its developer tool, and it is building a self-serve developer platform to allow more developers to create experiences with Kin. That is expected to launch later this year.
Update 7:45 a.m. Pacific: We originally referred to 44 consumer apps but were informed by Kin that this number has now changed to 40.