Kik says it is officially shutting down its messaging app and will reduce its headcount to 19 people, amid its heated legal battle with the SEC
The Kik app is officially shutting down. The company will reduce its headcount to 19 people, and will focus solely on converting Kin users into Kin buyers …
The shutdown ends the messenger half of that equation. A skeleton team of 19 will work solely on converting Kin users into Kin buyers — an admission that the app was no longer pulling its weight while legal bills mounted. The move also closes a loop opened back when Kik explored a sale or corporate investment in 2015: weeks later the messenger did find a buyer in MediaLab, leaving Kik Interactive a pure token company.
First-order effects
Kik's messaging users lose the app outright, while the remaining 19 employees pivot entirely from product operations to driving demand for the Kin token.
Kik sheds the infrastructure and moderation costs of running a consumer messenger at scale, freeing resources for the SEC fight over its $100M ICO.
Second-order effects
MediaLab picks up an abandoned consumer asset cheaply — folding the Kik messenger alongside Whisper in a holding-company model built on distressed social apps rather than original development.
Other startups that raised money via token sales face the same forced choice Kik just made: keep funding a product to support the token, or shrink to the token itself.
Third-order effects
The SEC's case culminated in a court granting summary judgment against Kik, establishing that a large ICO sold to the public counts as a securities offering — a precedent that raises the bar for every future token launch tied to a consumer product.
If the pattern holds, crypto-funded consumer apps consolidate around tokens as the surviving asset, with the underlying apps sold off or shut down — separating the venture bet from the community product.
The trend: Consumer apps funded by token sales are being forced to pick a side of their own structure — product or token — as securities enforcement makes supporting both untenable.
I just landed in Washington. I took off from Tel Aviv 12 hours ago. This is obviously fabricated. I'm not sure how Coindesk could make such an obvious mistake, but we'll find out https://twitter.com/...
We are all in on Kin. Going forward we will be singularly focused on one thing: converting millions of Kin users into millions of Kin buyers. More here: https://medium.com/...
. @ted_livingston confirms Kik will be shutdown While there will be a ton of FUD around $KIN, if you read the article you'll find that in order to focus on KIN, these are the steps they had to take. They are focusing on KIN 100% from here on. https://rsci.app.link/...
“As of May 2016, Kik Messenger had approximately 300 million registered users, and was used by approximately 40% of United States teenagers.” https://en.wikipedia.org/... Today Kik announced its shutting the app down https://medium.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@Techmeme @megesimpson Jesus. Just two years ago, 50% of American high schoolers were on Kik. And they turned down multi-billion dollar offers from Chinese buyers.
What's the point of $KIN when the @Kik app shuts down 🤷🏻♀️ 🤷🏻♀️ 🤷🏻♀ ️ “Utility token” is such a joke when it's fully dependent on a centrally operated application https://twitter.com/...
A messaging app used by 40% of US teenagers in 2016 shuts down to focus on cryptocurrency. Goes to show • monetizing messaging apps is hard • social media apps need to constantly innovate to keep a young audience (the Snapchat approach) https://betakit.com/...
So this is starting to get really interesting. @coindesk published an article in which it claims that Kik CEO Ted Livingston sent drunken misdirected messages to a reporter saying that he is quitting from Kik and that he is “not going to jail for this.” https://www.coindesk.com/.…