Kik Raises $50 Million in ICO Pre-Sale
Canadian mobile messaging app Kik is planning to raise $125 million through an initial coin offering (ICO) on September 12, but reports it has already pre-sold $50 million in tokens to large investors.
The company claims over 300 million active users registered worldwide. Kik believes that its token can join the areas of communications, information, and commerce in a new way that will fuel how today’s generation and future ones will connect.
Kik’s ICO will create a new cryptocurrency called Kin. The Kin token, which will be created as an ERC20 token on the ethereum blockchain, will exist not just within the Kik platform. Other platforms and companies will also be able to adopt it.
The company has allocated 1 trillion in tokens for the ICO. Of that amount, $50 million or 488 million tokens have already been sold in a presale round to select investors, including venture capital firm Blockchain Capital, hedge fund Pantera Capital, and Polychain Capital, another digital currency hedge fund.
Kik also plans to gift a certain amount of Kin to each user. They’ll be able use the new currency to buy games, live video streams, and other digital products. Kik’s goal is to attract new merchants to sell on the platform, creating a snowball effect where Kin becomes more valuable and more sellers pile onto Kik, increasing its popularity.
“Kik is by far the largest consumer company to enter the cryptocurrency space, and this is a seminal moment for the industry,” said Ryan Zurrer, principal and venture partner at Polychain Capital.
Kik CEO Ted Livingston said that Kin has been in the works since 2014 and is the successor of an earlier prototype called Kik Points, a non-blockchain digital currency.
Kik special initiatives manager Tanner Philp stated that the company’s goal is for Kin to become a general purpose cryptocurrency, which could be used as a method of value exchange between such stakeholders as users, developers and content creators.
