Kik Messenger shutting down over legal battle
Kik Interactive is shutting down its popular messaging app Kik Messenger because of the legal battle with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This was announced by CEO Ted Livingston on Monday. The tech startup raised $100 million in an initial coin offering back in 2017 to launch KIN tokens in its online ecosystem. However, the SEC believes the company issued unregistered securities.
Over one hundred employees at Kik Interactive and its other branches will lose their job. Ted Livingston confirmed that the company will continue with ‘an elite 19 person team’. This lowers their costs to 85 percent, giving Kik the financial strength to take on the SEC in court.
Despite the closing of Kik Messenger, KIN tokens and their ecosystem aren’t going anywhere. Livingston emphasizes that Kin is not available on many exchanges, and the company needs to create usability to create value. The company wants to move forward with Kin and achieve the following:
- Improve the Kin blockchain so that it supports billions consumers making a dozen transactions per day. Confirmation times should be just one second.
- They want to accelerate adoption, growth and success of all developers in the Kin ecosystem.
- And the company wants to build a mobile wallet that allows users to buy KIN easily, and then seamlessly explore the ecosystem from within the app.
Using KIN without Kik Messenger
After the announcement of closing Kik Messenger and the court case against the SEC, the value of KIN dropped. The value went from $0.000013 to $0.000009, which is a 31 percent drop. In November 2018 the token was still $0.000051, which already was the lowest value since the ICO in one year earlier.
Even though Kik Messenger is closing, there are still other apps where users can spend their KIN. Social media app Blastchat, tipping app Kinny, productivity app Pause For and beauty app Perfect365 are just a few examples.
Originally published at NEDEROB.
