Why is the Kik messenger shutting down?
Two years ago, Kik launched Kin after raising close to $100 million in its ICO. The event was one of the first held by a mainstream tech company. However, early in June of this year, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Kik Interactive, claiming the ICO was illegal. This was part of the commission’s agenda on targeting companies by alleging securities are issued illegally. The SEC also alleged that Kik management’s knew that the company would run out of money in 2017. Therefore, they started planning the launch of Kin. Kik Interactive countered the filing by saying the commission is misdirecting the court. The central issue of the lawsuit is that SEC alleges that Kin is a security and it violates securities laws while Kik Interactive denies the claim. In a blog post written by Livingston, he writes that after 18 months of working with SEC, we were given two options; either label kin security fight them in court. We went with the latter option. Livingston added that Kin isn’t available on most exchanges, on the contrary, it is used by millions of users in over dozens of independent apps. Kin has two million monthly active users and 600,000 monthly active spenders. The company is focused on increasing that number. The company will do it by enabling the Kin blockchain to support a billion consumers, i.e., making valid dozens transaction each day. Then increasing adoption and growth for developers using Kin. Finally, building a mobile wallet to make Kin easy to buy and use.
