Alright welcome everybody to the AMA
for May
let's jump right in so just before we
get started Yoel let me know we
obviously made a big announcement this
morning with forking Stellar and so we
haven't had enough time for all the
questions about that to get upvoted
to the top and so Yoel said
"hey let me go down and find the most
upvoted one of the Stellar questions and
let's start there
and then we'll come back to the top" so
that is what I'm going to do here I'm
just gonna search for his username. Wow
let's start here, awesome. Thank You Yoel.
Okay, "creating your own blockchain is an
absolutely massive undertaking. What do
you say to the investors who are worried
this is too ambitious and will prevent
the Kin core team from shipping within a
reasonable timeframe?" When we chose to
fork Stellar, we chose to do it because
it would accelerate our ability to
achieve our goals of making Kin the most
use cryptocurrency in the world. That's
it. It's not because, "hey wouldn't be cool
if we had our own blockchain or wouldn't be
fun if we could work on this and oh will this help us achieve our
goals faster. We came to the
conclusion that yes it would. You know we
started with Ethereum we said okay we
need a very secure cryptocurrency and we
said, "but Ethereum is not scalable so
we need to combine it with a
blockchain that is" so we looked at all
the options that we picked Stellar but
then we said with Stellar we need to put
Lumens in all the wallets but then
spammers could come in to try to steal
all those Lumens so we'd have to make
the SDK permission, you'd have to get our
approval to use the SDK as a developer
because that's the only way we could
give you the Lumens without knowing
that you would steal them. And we didn't
like that we said, "no if you have to come
talk to us to integrate Kin into your
app into your community" that sort of
defeats the whole purpose, we want
anybody to be able to integrate Kin and
so we said the only way we can do that
is by eliminating the Lumens
and the only way we can do that is by
forking Stellar and the beautiful thing
about this about the blockchain space is
everything is open source. So from day
one it's not like we're going back and
saying, "hey let's build our own
blockchain," we're simply setting up our own nodes of
the Stellar code that already exists.
We're taking all that Stellar code and
instead of it running on Stellar's
federation of nodes we can set up our
own federation of nodes and then simply
remove Lumens from the equation and so
in this way we can deliver that
scalability quickly that any developer
can integrate and with a great starting
point. You know we're not building
anything from scratch, we're starting
from the exact same place that the
core Stellar uses today. So to all these
people asking you know, "why are you doing
this, how is this gonna hurt the time
frame," we're doing this to accelerate the
time frame. Accelerate the time it takes
us to get to a scalable blockchain that
anybody can use. Okay let's jump back to
Tom. "Has either Apple or Google approved
the use of Kin tokens in any apps in
their stores and if they say no what are
your plans?" This is a great question.
There's lots of apps today in both the
iPhone App Store and the Google Play
Store that allow you to access all the
tokens and cryptocurrencies you have but
in all those apps today they don't
actually let you use those
cryptocurrencies, they only let you
manage them. "Hey what are all the
cryptocurrencies I'm holding, how much
are those worth, do I want to increase my
how much I'm holding here or do I want
to decrease and that's it." Whereas what
we're trying to do with Kin is to allow
consumers, millions ultimately billions
of consumers, to unlock content with
their cryptocurrency and so this is
something that nobody has ever done
before and so this is new for Apple and
new for Google and something we are
working through with them. Because today on Apple especially the
only way you are allowed to unlock content
today given the current rules is using
in-app purchase and what we're saying is
in-app purchase doesn't work for us, we
have a cryptocurrency that's both about
both earning and spending and in very
small amounts something only a
cryptocurrency like Kin can deliver and
so these are conversations we are having
with Apple about what this would look
like, how it worked, how the rules would
have to be updated to allow for this but
even as we work through this something
that Apple does allow today is tipping
where in an app I can use a virtual
currency to tip other people in the
community to say thank you so I think at
a minimum we get tipping on Apple and
then we can do whatever we want on
Google but we are hoping to do both full
earning and spending on both Apple and
on Google and those are conversations
we're having and conversations that
really nobody else in the world
is having with Apple like we are.
"What is Plan B for Kin tokens if the
SEC says it's a security?
This is a really important question because regulators are around the world are
trying to figure out what these things
are and how they should be regulated.
For Kin to be successful as the most used
cryptocurrency in the world by
mainstream consumers, consumers need to be able to very frictionlessly and
easily earn and spend very small amounts
in all the digital apps that they use.
And in order for that to work,
Kin cannot be a security. There just be
way too much complexity, way too much
overhead for a consumer saying, "hey I
just wanted to buy a sticker and I had
to fill out this crazy thing in order to
do so." So it's very important that Kin is
not a security, not just in the United
States but around the world and I think
this is the interesting thing about
crypto right now is that it is a 
global opportunity. It's not just the
United States but it's also Japan and
Canada and the UK and all these
different jurisdictions trying to figure
out, "okay how should we regulate this and
the SEC is just one jurisdiction. They're
just the U.S. so what is our plan B if
Kin were to be determined to be a
security in the United States? Then we
would simply go elsewhere. There are lots
of countries around the world Japan
being a great example who are putting up
their hands and saying we recognize that
this is the next big thing. We also
recognize that we do need regulation but
not at the expense of innovation. And so
already we are setting up relationships,
contacts and spending a lot of time in
countries like Japan so that Kin can be
in as many countries as possible no
matter how the regulation falls on a per
country basis. CryptoCryptonaire. I don't
know if you were an ambassador but I see
you a lot so thank you. Okay,
wow there's a lot of sub comments on
this. The late, thelatemercutio. Oh I
probably shouldn't say people's names I'm going to get
in trouble at some point. "In order to
come out far ahead and become
uncatchable I figured the plan would be
to remain as quiet as possible right up
until the launch on Kik or perhaps even
until the launch of the KRE and the
Ecosystem apps. If that's the case why
promote at all? You're speaking at
Consensus and other conferences and Alex spoke at Collision. You're sharing your ideas
with the world and opening up the
opportunity for anyone to copy, is this a
sign that the launch is almost ready?
Winky face. How will you prevent getting
copied and crush when your software is
open-source and you have no patents or
copyrights. Wow this is a great fucking
question. This is a great question,
this is the crux that we ask ourselves everyday
on what is the best way to operate in
this short interim period to maximize
the chances that Kin becomes the most
used cryptocurrency in the world because
on one side we want to be super
transparent with the community. You know
this is an open source movement, this is
where everybody can be a stakeholder,
this is something that we all need to do
together. But on the other side we know
that these big monopolies have like
thousands and thousands of people and
undoubtedly some of them are watching
this AMA right now and taking notes and
passing it on. And if you were to ask me
"Ted, what are the odds that Facebook or
Google are going to get into
cryptocurrencies and one day compete
with Kin?" What would I say? I would say
100%. I would bet 100% that either
Facebook or Google or both will get into
this space in a big way at some point
and once again used their monopoly
position to try to copy and crush Kin.
And we have a long history of this. We
were the first chat to go viral back in
2010. We were the first chat to become a 
platform in 2011. The first one to do bots
in 2014 and every time Facebook, a year
to two years later copied everything
almost down to pixel by pixel and so
this time around
question we were asking ourselves is, 
"what is the way to maximize the odds
that this time Kin wins? Now this time we
have a lot of advantages we've have
never had before. The biggest which is
there's a tool to now economically align
everybody to work together, we've never
had that before. We've never had a way to
give everybody a stake in the ecosystem
before but even in spite of that how do
we operate such that when these
monopolies realize what's happening on
the same day that they realize that this
is going to change the world, is the same
day they realize that it's too late. And
so in these AMAs and all our postings
we talk about 98% of the things we are working on but we
leave about 2% out. The 2% that we feel is
critical to winning this race that we
don't want to reveal until it becomes
obvious. And this is tough
you know, you have all these other
projects out there that are hyping their
projects around all the conferences or
they're talking about how complex the
technology is but they have no one using
the product and everybody looks at them
and said why can't you be more like them
you know why can't you just be out
hyping it all the time and the answer to
that is because we actually think we
know the winning strategy and it looks
nothing like what those guys are doing.
So if in the interim in this middle
period if that means that we have to be
a little bit misunderstood, a little bit
punished, then that's okay because we
have the vision, we have the strategy, we
have a ten-year history of seeing the
future first and executing on it and we
have everything we need right now to
execute. And so if we share that final 2%
could we move Kin way off in the
cryptocurrency rankings? Probably. But
that wouldn't help us win in the long
term and that's what we are all about. We
have been at this for a very long time
and this time we want to win. And so we
are playing the game differently and you
can continue to expect that from us. Good
question. Dill0n. Alright. "Today you
announced that Kin is forking Stellar to
run its own federated consensus with
nodes operated by services that
integrate Kin and are incentivized by
the KRE but right now Kik and maybe
Hawk Incentives is the only digital
service that is participating in the
ecosystem and therefore the consensus.
I can hear the FUD coming from a mile away
which we've heard before with Ripple
"This crypto is now centralized and
censorable"
how can you counter these claims with no
ecosystem partners today?" To me how the
blockchain gets built out is a
progression. And that progression will
evolve over time as the needs and the
requirements evolve with it, okay. So what
was the first thing we needed? The first
thing we needed was a very secure
blockchain with which to create Kin and
that was Ethereum.
And so today everybody who has Kin if
you want it to be the most secure, the
least censorable, the least centralized
just keep it on Ethereum.
No problem, it's beautiful. But then we
said but Ethereum is not going to
work for mainstream consumers. As a
consumer, if i want to spend a penny
here, and earn a penny there do
I care how decentralized it is? No, I just
want it to work and so that's where we
came up with Stellar and right now in
our three-step plan to make Kin the most
use cryptocurrency in the world, step
number one is to have a scalable blockchain that can support mainstream
consumer scale. Nobody in the world has
that today, I think we're gonna be the
first in the world to have that by
combining our fork of Stellar with the
Ethereum blockchain.
Step number two is to then integrate
Kin into Kik on day one, make in the
most used cryptocurrency in the world by
mainstream consumers. Kik acts as the
launch vehicle for Kin but Kik also
acts going forward as the lighthouse for
what is possible in creating Kin
experiences and then step number three
is to grow an ecosystem where kin
expands beyond Kik and goes into more
and more apps, big apps of small apps and
everywhere in between until
billions of consumers are using Kin.
every day earning and spending it across
thousands or tens of thousands of
digital apps.
So what that means is right now when Kik
is the only one who is integrating Kin
is the first one, the fact that Kik is
the only one running a federated node is
fine because here's the reality,
is consumers who use Kik
trust Kik because they have to. Kik
delivers the software to their phone,
that delivers all the messages, sees all
the messages, yes there's encryption in
between through the servers, but Kik is
rendering all the messages on our device
so if we wanted to take all those
messages we could so consumers trust
Kik today. So do they also trust Kik to run these
federated nodes? Of course they do and
this is the beautiful thing about our
blockchain strategy is let's say we had
the second big digital service and then
they create a federated node, do the
consumers of that app trust that app and
do the consumers of that trust Kik? Yes
of course they do.
And so over time as we add more
consumers and more apps and therefore as
we add more federated nodes of the
owners of those apps, Kin on the consumer
side gets more and more 
decentralized over time until no one app
could censor the network and the
beautiful thing in between now and then
is you always have the choice of
Ethereum. The second that you as either
a long term holder or as a consumer
don't like the idea that maybe just one
two, three, four, five, six, sixty, six
hundred digital services are running the
federation, you can always move your Kin
back to Ethereum and on Ethereum you
know it's 100% secure and 100%
decentralized. So I think this is
the difference between Kin and all the
other projects out there. All the other
projects out there are saying what can
we build with the technology and then I
wonder what products we can build with
that, where Kin is the opposite.
We've been spending years thinking about it
the other way around. What product do we
want it build and then how do we
piece together that technology to get
there the fastest and I just think this
is such a better approach. It allows us
to see the exact specific requirements
for what we need to build with the
blockchain because we know exactly the
product experience we want to enable and
that is so unlike almost every other
project out there right.
"Correct me if I'm wrong but Kik wants
millions of regular people including
children to open Kin wallets and
transact. Right now in the U.S. they would
all be expected to report capital gains
on every single spend and income tax for
every single earn. Tn the Congress we've
seen some support for de minimis tax
exemption legislation for
cryptocurrencies but it's progressing
rather slowly. What steps will you take
to ensure millions of users and their
families don't get charged with
negligent tax evasion?" This is another
very good question, I love this community
that's a great question.
On every single vector of cryptocurrency
the answer is, "it's complicated."
The technology is complicated, the
profits complicated,
compliance is complicated, partnerships
are complicated, and tax is complicated.
We don't know the answer to this
question, like with the question around
the SEC, there's different jurisdictions
all over the world who are looking at
this and trying to figure out what they
will do in their country and so what we
can do, the only thing we can do is hire
the best people in the world to come
work with us from a tax point of view
and to then go into all these
jurisdictions to work with them to get
exemptions like this but I think the the
good thing here is a lot of
this comes down to intent.
You know our intent is for this to
absolutely be tax compliance in every
jurisdiction where Kin operates and we
will work with the regulators as much as
possible to make that true. But in the
meantime, do we think it's okay if some
individual earns one penny worth of Kin?
Yeah we think that's okay. We're going to
make sure, but we think that's okay, the
intent is good but as we
think this through and as we think a couple
of steps ahead something that gets us
really interested is how can we actually
turn that around? How could we actually
create an incentive for these local tax
authorities all around the world
to embrace Kin? To make it really easy
for consumers to report tax and to make
it really easy for their place of
residence at you know the federal level
and the local level to collect that tax.
I think that's going to be a really
interesting thing up in the next few
years.
Will Kin prices for digital services in
the marketplace be pegged to fiat values
and adjust in real time, or
will they be fixed values that sellers
can update as frequently as necessary?
What are the pros and cons of each
method? I'm just thinking about who would
ask this question. I think one of the
biggest issues with cryptocurrencies
today, other cryptocurrencies, is they're
trying to compete with dollars. They're
saying, "hey you buy your coffee in
dollars today but you should buy in
Bitcoin tomorrow" and the world has given
a resounding answer to that proposition
which is no. And it's not for lack of
effort. People have been trying to get
the world to buy coffees with Bitcoins
for almost a decade now and it has yet
to happen and there's all these reasons
why. Oh the technology's not fast enough,
the user experience isn't good enough
and that is not the answer.
The answer is because the logic is
fundamentally flawed and so when we
think about Kin and we think about what
consumers will use it for on the earning
side and the spending side we think it
will be for things that aren't priced in
dollars today. It will be for things in
the digital world where they can earn
and spend where Kin is the only option.
So you know comparing the pros and cons
of each method, if you peg it to dollars
the con is it will never work.
The option where you focus on things
that aren't denominated in dollars, the
pro is it might work and from our
experience with Kik Points we strongly
believe there is a way where it will
work. Okay. "Hi Ted, I'm wondering what your
thoughts are on the marketing side of
Kin? Are you going to be all-in
aggressive marketing like having it on
games sites, tech sites, sponsored videos in due time
when Kin is released or will it be low-key
marketing and people will hear Kin from
word of mouths slowly but surely?
Also can we get the latest from the
Unity developers? Did they like it so far?
What's their overall take on it?" That's two
questions in one, umoop. Okay I will allow it this time
but from now on I'm only gonna answer
one at a time.
Are you gonna be all-in aggressive
marketing? Yes we are gonna be all-in
aggressive in marketing? Why because this
is a race to be the most used cryptocurrency
currency in the world and marketing is
going to be a critical component to
making sure that Kin is the one to
achieve that. But what is critical is
well then why aren't you marketing today?
Because today there is no call to action.
Okay we can't say to consumers, "hey all
of you Kin is this amazing thing you
should go use it in Kik? Why? Because
we've opened up Kin to a very small
portion of users inside Kik because Kin
inside Kik today is running on
Ethereum and if we send more than a few
thousand users to Ethereum they will
crash the network and this is why we're
forking Stellar. So today there is no call to
action for consumers in Kik or in any
app. On the developer side there is also
no call to action today. Developers says
"hey I'm super excited which I go do?" We say
you should wait. You should wait for
the SDK. You should wait for the KRE
you should wait. We are now racing to change
those two things again coming back to
our three-step strategy: 1) build a
scalable blockchain 2) integrating to
Kik to make in the most usedcryptocurrency in the world and to serve as a
lighthouse of what is possible and then
3) get everybody else on board through
the SDK, the KRE, and the partnerships team.
When we have step 3 in market, the SDK, the KRE, that's when you can expect us to
ramp up marketing because that's when
there is a true call to action and so in
between in a way we are doing the
minimum viable amount of marketing to
still keep the community, to keep all of
you engaged and confident that we are
moving forward behind the scenes so
marketing is going to be critical. On the
Unity side we have a group in Japan
right now I believe working with Unity
and I was in Tel Aviv the other week and
we were thinking about you know,
what's the headline for Unity developers
that we put on the website and you know
is it you know we're helping with
monetization or we're helping with
engagement and what we said, when I
laugh, where we landed that everybody
was sort of the most excited about it
was monetize in a fundamentally new way.
This is going to be the value
proposition not just for game developers
but for developers of all types, whether
they be messaging apps are live
streaming apps or you name it. If you
build a digital app with Kin, you will be
able to monetize in a fundamentally new
way but it's not just monetize, it's
also the fundamentally new way. You know
it's not just about making money.
Of course it is you need that, you need that
to be able to sustain yourself but
imagine you could make money in a
way that made the consumer experience
better as well. And this is the
fundamental flaw of advertising. It's a
way to make money but fundamentally it
makes the consumer experience worse
where the developer is trying to
manipulate you into buying something you
might not want or you might not need. So
when we look at Kin as a monetization
tool, the goal is no longer to extract
value through advertising from your
consumers, it's to facilitate the
exchange of value
between your consumers and in doing so
we think not only as a developer can you
make money but also you can make your
experience better you get a powerful new
tool to make the experience better and
we have seen this with Kik firsthand. We
have spent the last six months working
on answering the question, "how can we
best use Kik to drive demand for Kin, to launch Kin? But along the way we have
realized that Kin is a fundamentally new
tool that we can use to drive the growth
of Kik so it's not just a way to make
money but it's a way to also make the
consumer experience fundamentally better.
So every developer we've talked to, every
single one like from my knowledge,
everyone I've ever talked to go this is
amazing. This is exactly what I need and
it's almost like you know this like veil
comes off they're like, "yeah fuck
Facebook you know those guys just copy us
all the time, they're making it so hard for
us, it's not fair. It's not fair and I
haven't been able to say it before."
Developers say this, theyhaven't
been able to say this before because
there was no alternative but now there
is and now that there is, fuck those guys
let's do this together. And so the
excitement, the passion, the response we
are getting from this community is
amazing but the SDK is not there today,
nobody in the world has a scalable
blockchain today and that's why we are
moving like the wind to deliver that to
the world.
Why? Not because we feel a responsibility
to the community although of course we
do but because we feel a responsibility
to ourselves to see this amazing
opportunity to see everybody we talked
to get so excited about it and we feel a
responsibility to ourselves, to be the
ones to capture that opportunity, to be
the ones that this time are not just
copied and crushed by monopolies and
they just take it for themselves.
The response has been amazing.
Our goal is for Kin to be the most used
cryptocurrency in the world that's our
goal.
The three-step plan is deliver a
scalable blockchain and we're trying to
do that as fast as we can. Everytime we learn, we're moving fast
okay Ethereum, Stellar, fork Stellar, let's go
let's go let's go. Two, integrating into Kik
at scale, use Kik alone to make Kin the
most use cryptocurrency in the world by
main stream consumers. Go! The window is
now. Make Kin the most used cryptocurrency
in the world and be a lighthouse for
what is possible in Kin and then three
move like the wind to put together the
ecosystem so that by the time Facebook
or some other monopolies enters a space
and once again tries to copy and crush
it for themselves, there's not just one,
two, three, four, a thousand, a million but
hundreds of millions of consumers and
thousands of developers who are saying
not this fucking time and that's what
we're putting together and we're putting
it together for all of you but we're
putting it together for ourselves as
well. With that we're at the end of our
May AMA and I look forward to seeing you
all next month.
