Kin

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the whole purpose of Kin - since the beginning - was to be used as a test case for USV. It was a failing portfolio company anyway, may as well use it as cover for your other investments and possibly make some money along the way.

Today I saw an interesting interview with the Kik CEO, in which he explains Kik will be selling tokens in an ICO, and that this will allow them to return some capital to institutional investors. In effect, investors are getting the exit without selling equity & Kik Inc gets an influx of cash they can spend as they choose.

It's like, you want Kin to be a cryptocurrency. But you don't want users or even the apps that they use Kin to use cryptocurrency nodes. If you don't have that, then there's no trust-minimization, no security and we're back at an in-app points system.

It doesn't help the users of Kin that a couple of large stakeholders somewhere run Kin full nodes if no one is doing it on their behalf. If no one is doing that, it doesn't help them at all that there's a blockchain or that the blockchain is federated.

[Kin is] catering to, and preying on, institutions that don't truly understand the space and likely have LP pressure to invest. It's much easier for them to get behind an investment with a CEO and a traditional user base. Kin was the first of this sort. I expect more to come

Over the last few years, we’ve seen messenger apps grow in scope a lot, led by WeChat. Much of the growth has been tying payments of all forms into chat. This is natural as much chat —> commerce. Seems highly probable that we’re not that far away from major messengers - WhatsApp, Telegram, etc - building payments natively.

Kin is obviously first high profile example, but everything about Kin is wrong. The messenger that wants true adoption should implement using BTC, ETH, or stable coin directly. Those assets have much higher liquidity to fiats, which would really kickstart “banking the
unbanked” dream of crypto.