The Pomp Podcast - Ted Livingston, CEO of Kik: Defending Crypto

Episode Date: May 30, 2019

Ted Livingston is the CEO of Kik. In this conversation, Ted and Anthony Pompliano discuss building one of the most popular messaging apps in the world, the challenges with creating sustainable business models for these products, how cryptocurrencies could be a solution, where Kik is with the regulatory battle they're currently in. Pomp plays devil's advocate to throw Ted every negative argument about Kik and Kin he's ever heard. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Ted Livingston is the CEO of Kik. In this conversation, we discuss building one of the most popular messaging apps in the world, the challenges with creating sustainable business models for these products, how cryptocurrencies could be a solution, where Kik is with the regulatory battle they're currently in. And then I play devil's advocate to throw Ted every negative argument about kick and kin I've ever heard. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by

Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have Kik's CEO, Ted Livingston here with us. Ted, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk about everything you got going on. Awesome to be here. Thanks for having me. For sure. All right. Before we get into the meaty, fun stuff that I think everyone is listening to this for, let's kind of give people context on just your background, how you got started building Kik, and how we got to maybe like the last two years or so when it comes to crypto.

Sounds good. What up? Yeah, just kind of dig right into your background. Sure. So I started Kik over 10 years ago now. It's pretty incredible to look back that it's been that much time. My background is I was very early at Blackberry, working there before the iPhone came out, got to see mobile very early. And so left there to start a company, looked at this smartphone and said, this is going to be the thing, the next big mega trend of technology. I want to do something in it. So I played around with a few different ideas

and eventually landed on a chat app. So we launched Kik in October 2010 and it just blew up. It was SMS but free for your iPhone, your Android, or your Blackberry. So it was all the major platforms at the time. It went zero to a million users in 15 days, million to two million users in seven days. So it's absolutely insane, fastest growing thing in known human history, people flying in from all over the world my mom's calling me she's like ted you know whoopi goldberg is talking about kick on the view uh so just a super surreal time and you know this is just in the very very early days of mobile um through that i was able to raise a lot of money and start building

a business uh the thing that we loved about kick is it didn't have the sort of pressure of social media and trying to you know get off this sort of perfect persona and you know likes and favorites and all these things. It was just chat. You know, just be who you want to be, be yourself and just come and hang out. None of that pressure from social media here. So people love that.

It did really well, grew huge. In 2015, Tencent invested $50 million at a billion dollar valuation. And we're a very small company, you know, 100 employees, billion dollars. There was just one challenge. We didn't make any money. we didn't make any money and we you know we'd seen thousands of other messengers

sort of come and go a bunch of them tried to do advertising advertising doesn't really fit in when you're just doing private communication but also we were sort of philosophically opposed to it we didn't like the idea of taking our users data and attention and monetizing it not giving them anything back so very early on we were very keen to find a new business model in a world where you know what it appeared to everybody else is that advertising is the only option so this is where we got really excited about bitcoin in 2011 i think bitcoin is one of the greatest inventions of our time absolutely amazing and we realized that wait a second this could be a fundamentally new business model for us but also for the thousands of other developers out there

that are having trouble monetizing their creations in a world that is you know advertising monopolized by a few big companies. So we started testing that out. We launched a currency inside our app called Kip Points in 2013, 2014. That worked really well. And we said, wow, this could be a real model. We launched our own cryptocurrency.

But instead of rewarding the miners who secure the network, we should reward the developers who get people earning and spending kin. And if we could do that, we could build money for the digital world. This is sort of like Euro. Before you keep going, I want to go back to this creation of the first currency that you had, right?

So in 2013, 2014, you've got a messaging communication platform people are using, and you knew that monetization was going to be a challenge. And you guys actually created what kind of feels like a cryptocurrency. It just wasn't based on the blockchain. It wasn't cryptographically secure as we think about cryptocurrencies, but it was digital points or an incentive within the application. Is that correct? That's correct. Yeah.

And how are people using that? I think this is what is really interesting. Obviously, there's been lots of in-game currencies over the years. There's nothing unique there. What was unique about KikPoints? what we were really trying to prove to ourselves and to others is that we could build a economy around a new digital currency inside of a digital app. So what I mean by that is with KikPoints, there is no way to buy KikPoints and there is no way to sell KikPoints, right? So you think of any

other digital currency, you know, step one is they say, okay, go buy something, buy it with $5 or $10, whatever it is in kick there was no way to buy kick points you could only earn them and spend them and what we're trying to do there is like we're trying to build money for the digital world and we said could we build a an economy a self-contained economy around a new currency and so we said so what value can people provide in the digital world what's sort of like you know your first job in the physical world you know it's pumping gas or serving coffee what is the equivalent of that in the digital world we said is it's selling your your time your attention and your data and so where it all started with kick points the first job in our digital world was

selling your attention you know watch this ad if you do somebody will pay us for that we'll take that money and we'll give it to you in the form of kick points and that sort of started the basis of the economy then we needed the first thing you could spend it on you know what could i go spend on. We started with stickers. But then once that happened, we had the basis of an economy. People could, they understood how they could earn the currency. They understood that they could spend the currency. And so then they said, well, what else can I get for this currency? And how else can I earn this currency? And from there, we were able to build this whole new economy, more and more things to spend it on, more and more ways to earn it, things like giving advice

or hosting experiences, and build this whole economy that was totally disconnected from the fiat world. People were earning and spending this new currency, getting to the point where millions of people were transacting in KikPoint. And that's what got us really excited that it would be possible to build money for the digital world, not just inside of Kik, but inside of thousands of other consumer apps out there and build this new global currency. Got it. And so as you're doing this, at what point do you go from, hey, we have KikPoint to uh let's create a true cryptocurrency right which eventually became kin like what was the uh the inflection point there the inflection point was so we had all this data from kickpoints

we knew from very early on that this was a test to launch our own cryptocurrency and then that could be a new business model but even in 2014 2015 even in some ways today that's a bit of a crazy idea you know you go to your investors and you say wait a second so you're telling me instead of doing ads and monetizing that way because that's what everybody does you're proposing instead a fundamentally new business model based on owning a piece of a cryptocurrency and so that took us some time to explain to our investors that this made sense and really the inflection point was When we saw Snapchat filed their S1, and here's a company that had an amazing product insight, perfect execution, raised billions of dollars to thousands of employees, and even they were having trouble with the advertising business model. Even they were having trouble competing with these big centralized companies.

And so that was the point where I went to our first investor, Fred Wilson, and explained to him, hey, Fred, I know we've been doing this kick points thing. we think there's a new model by turning kick points into a cryptocurrency not just for us but for any many other apps as well and i remember we were having lunch and i was explaining to this uh to him for the first time it was maybe three years ago and i hadn't explained it to any of our other investors yet and he's sitting there he's listening he's listening and then at the end he goes ted that's crazy but it just might work and so from there you know as he dug into more as wow this really could work this could be the thing that kick and all other consumer apps 99% of other consumer app developers need to monetize their creations and so him and i went around and

explained this and it took time to the rest of the investors until everybody else was on board that this could be our business model. And so I think, you know, just a lot of people look back and say, so you didn't have any other options. You launched Canon. That's correct. But I think what's so interesting about this is look at who we were competing with. iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram.

What do all these apps have in common? None of them make money. None of them make money. They're all funded by a very wealthy corporate entity in the case of Facebook or Apple, or they're funded by a wealthy individual in the case of Telegram. And so while we saw app after app go out of business, we were the first ones in the world to find a viable business model for a messenger, for private communication. And now you're seeing Telegram and Facebook and others pivot into that business model that we discovered years ago. Got it. And so let's talk a little bit about the kind of opportunity here, right? Because I do think that it's important that people realize whether it's Facebook, Telegram, you guys or others, a lot of eyes are on this now.

A lot of people are saying, hey, this is a path forward. It is likely to be the path forward in terms of the most successful. Everyone has their own twist on how to execute it, their own structures. Is the cryptocurrency backed by a commodity or not? All that kind of stuff. Maybe just kind of frame up for us what you think that opportunity looks like. Is this a winner-take-all type situation? Can there be multiple winners? What does that look like? the opportunity we see is money um we think blockchain is going to be used for lots of different things but i think when we look back 10 20 years from now the biggest winners and the most valuable applications of the blockchain technology will be new currencies new money and this is what we realized back in 2011 i remember first learning about bitcoin realizing that this was this fundamentally new technology and going out and buying every book I could find on the history of money.

And we realized back then that this could be an opportunity, a super disruptive opportunity, you know, a bit out there, but that this is the killer application of blockchain technology. Since then, you know, we think there's going to be different types of money, different types of money 2.0. I think Bitcoin started out as trying to be money for the physical world, competing with the dollar. It's now become digital gold, which I think is amazing.

um but we we saw the volatility associated with bitcoin we said well that's not going to really work in the physical world because you know everybody wants to pay all their expenses in dollars so everybody wants to get paid in dollars and nobody wants the volatility so what we did is we went and we said yeah but in the digital world it's this totally new economy you know kick points it's a totally new economy there the volatility won't matter because you're earning in the currency and you're spending in the currency and so that's where we went we said let's go build money for the digital world money not just for kick but all these different apps and that's proven to be very successful in the last month over a million people earned kin over

300 000 people have spent kin this is on chain where people are in custody of their own keys and this is across 40 independent apps but there is still the opportunity of money for the physical world. Bitcoin went after that. It's now gold. That's great. But so is there going to be a cryptocurrency that goes after the opportunity of being money for the physical world? And it's clear at this point to me that the answer is yes. This is what Facebook is going after. They have a beautiful potential for a playbook. I want it all. I wrote a Medium post. Facebook isn't going after Bitcoin. They're going after the dollar. And in that post, I led the strategy. To me, it's pretty straightforward you know create a stable coin get it funded with remittances to developing countries

where you can offer a 10 times better solution once people receive it in those developing countries use the wechat playbook to get people to keep their money inside the system and then combine whatsapp instagram and facebook messenger to to roll out this global communication and commerce platform that starts in developing countries but sort of country by country takes over the world. And in doing so, at some point, you could then unpeg global coin from the dollar due to the dollar when the dollar did to gold. And where you end up is with a new global currency, the Facebook currency. So to answer your question, I think there's going to be multiple winners. We are not going after money for the physical world. We're going after money for the digital

world. But I think there will be people who go after money for the physical world as well. And I think the world is about to be surprised just how quickly that starts to move and just how disruptive that ends up being. Absolutely. And so there's a whole bunch to unpack there, right? I think one of the things that scares me, and I've specifically thought about from a financial services business, JPM coin, is this idea that somebody could issue a digital currency that is backed by a fiat currency or a commodity, they could grow adoption and then unpeg it in the future, right? And I've basically come out and said, you know, there should be some sort of regulatory guidelines or rules that prevent somebody from doing that. So if you go out and

you say we have X currency, it is backed by Y commodity or currency, you should never be able to unpeg it. If you want to create a separate currency that is unpeg, you can do that, but you have to do a new currency. You can never unpeg it. And the belief there is you essentially would be selling something to people today that tomorrow you would completely change the value proposition once there's adoption, right? So it's kind of a bait and switch. Do you feel like that's a valid concern? Do you think that actually doesn't really matter? You know, kind of where do you come out on that? Not only do I think that's a valid concern, I think actually that literally is the playbook. You know, if we go back to the history of the dollar for a long time,

it was no, don't worry, this is 100% backed by gold, this is 100% backed by gold. And that was true until the day it wasn't. And then we sort of forgotten that to history. And now the dollar has nothing to do with gold um we already see this happening with stable coins today you look at tether and yeah it's backed by the dollar it's backed by the dollar and then all of a sudden we find out actually it's not backed by the dollar or not completely and that hasn't seemed to slow down whatsoever um so i think this is it's not just the concern i agree with you i think it's actually a huge concern and should be but i actually think it's going to be the playbook um you know if we could roll out a new global currency we'll bootstrap it by pegging it to

the dollar you know how much could a new global currency be worth and then when we unpeg it i actually think it will be fully decentralized i think people who say oh but facebook would you know never make it fully decentralized depends what the incentive is and if the incentive is owning 10 or 20 of the world's money um and all they need to do is make it fully decentralized i think they're going to do that and so what's scary to me is not that we'll have this new global currency i think that would be great i think what concerning to me is 10 20 30 percent of that global currency will be owned by a company that has a very bad track record when it comes to doing things that are good and right for humanity um you know if a new global currency could be

worth 100 trillion dollars you put 10 20 30 trillion dollars in facebook's pocket if all they need to do is make it decentralized i guarantee you they're going to do that but once they do that what they could do from there um to me that's the real concern absolutely and so i guess let's move to uh kin and kick right maybe walk us through as you guys decided okay we're going to take the kick points and we're going to turn that into a true cryptocurrency um talk a little bit about kind of the technical structure of that and then how um you thought about getting that in the hands of individuals with the token sale, et cetera? Let's take those one at a time.

First, we'll talk about the technology, and then we'll talk about the token sale. The technology has been very complex. We built KickPoints. We spent six years building the user experience, doing the product design, designing the economics, and actually getting people to use a new currency in a new economy. We were very successful at that. But what we weren't focused on was actually getting the core blockchain technology ready to power all of that. And so when we launched Kin in 2017, we were very open that Ethereum probably was not going to work.

It was June 2017, I was at a Bitcoin meetup and I talked about it, like, you know, Ethereum wouldn't be able to handle it, but it was the best that was available on the market today. So we were going to start there, get in the game and then iterate from there. And so that's what we did. We started on Ethereum, crashed pretty quickly. The first problem we needed to solve was scalability. We looked at all the options. That's one of our values. What are all the options?

And of all the blockchains in production, in market, that were tested in real-world scenarios, Stellar was by far the best example of that. So we started combining Stellar with the Ethereum blockchain. That was sort of problem one that was fixed. from there though people were confused you know i send you 10 kin but you only get nine kin or i send you 10 kin but there was this one kin fee i don't understand like and so we said well simplest thing for the consumer would be i send you 10 kin i get 10 kin uh that's that's just how it works so there are no fees and so what we started to think about is is there a different

way to secure the network that does not involve transaction fees such that we could have these frictionless fee-free microtransactions so we talked to the stellar team about that they were excited but it was going to take quite a while and so we decided to fork the stellar blockchain build our own version set up our own federation among all the other developers who are already building for kin and had kin in their apps and we launched the kin blockchain so that was about an 18 month process it was a incredibly difficult process for for us and everybody in the ecosystem, starting with Ethereum, moving to Stellar, and then ultimately moving to our completely owned custom blockchain.

On the token sales side, this is where we wanted to be a bit different as well. You know, we thought $100 million was roughly the right number, $125. And we wanted a mix of both private and public participation. And so we had a ton of demand from private investors at the time saying, you know, we we're super excited about this you know we've been waiting for the right group who's been thinking about cryptocurrency for all these years and so we had a lot of demand but we capped that demand at 50 million people wanted to buy a lot more but we said listen no we don't want to take more we only want to take so much money we only want to sell so much kin and it's very important

for us that the world is part of this on day one and when we said that we said you know there's all these other token sales at the time that were either unfair you know just uncap raising hundreds of millions of dollars um so maybe a little bit too much but you know that was their choice or on the other side there were cap sales but they'd sell out in 10 seconds and so only a few whales would get to participate and we said listen we want this to be fair we don't want this to be some big FOMO thing um so here's how we're going to do it if you want to buy Kin you have to pre-register with your passport and so 17 000 people from over 120 countries pre-registered with their passports we actually set up our own like sort of customs department to approve all these passports

i myself sort of approved 200 passports for people to get into the uh the kin token sale we have to do passwords obviously to make sure that people weren't creating multiple accounts and so that it would be fair and then also help with a bunch of the other regulatory pieces as well so we did that and then we started very slow we took the the 50 or 75 million that was available on the public side we divided it by those 17 000 pre-registrations and so i think that was roughly six thousand dollars and we said hey if you pre-registered you now have the opportunity to participate you can send up to six thousand dollars worth of ether to buy up to six thousand dollars worth of Kin. You have 24 hours to do that. No pressure. If you want to buy this,

join the ecosystem, go ahead and do that. And so it was actually a very uneventful token sale. There wasn't this big frenzy. It was just very calm. People were like, oh, how much do I want to buy? Buy it to use in my app, buy it to use it, or for whatever reason I was buying it. Once that was done, that's when we opened up the caps and sold the rest. I think this is the other thing about the token sale as well. We're building money for the digital world. We are all in the digital world today. Today, we are not being compensated by these big companies. We give them all our attention, all of our data, and we see nothing in return. We really wanted to create a movement around a more fair world. If we were going to

create that movement, it was very important to us that we get as many people in from the ground floor and so ultimately over 10 000 people ended up buying kin from over 117 countries and that was really cool for us got it and so did you guys allow anybody in terms of uh any country uh to purchase or were there some rules around who could purchase as well there were rules around who could purchase um we did a bunch of ofax screening and ml stuff but we also looked to countries that were providing clear guidance so i don't know if if you remember at the time, but at the time, China put a pause on all ICOs. And so we had thousands and thousands of people signed up from China who wanted to buy Kin, you know,

they pre-registered. And we had to go back to them and say, you know, sorry, but your government has made it clear that we cannot allow you to participate. So we pulled out China. We also pulled up Canada. You know, the regulators there said, actually, no, we think the Howey test is the wrong test, is not the right test. So all of our analysis had been based on the Howey test. So they said, nope, the Howey test is incorrect. And therefore, you know, we do not want you selling this to Canadians. Fine. So we pulled out Canada as well. But we did not hear anything or any clear guidance from any other of the countries in the world. And so we proceeded and people participated from 117 countries. Got it. So really the two were China and Canada there that

you kind of preemptively excluded. Correct. Got it. All right. So here's what I want to do is I want to play a little game of devil's advocate, right? And so I'm going to take the role of the detractors, the people who think that you're completely full of shit and your project doesn't work, uh, et cetera. And I'm going to relay what I, what I think, or I've heard are the biggest criticisms. And then I'll allow you to, you know, kind of just bluntly address each one point by point. Right. And I think that what, you know, really my, my hope here is that, uh, I'm a huge fan of, um, allowing entrepreneurs to hear their criticisms, uh, of the detractors and then just respond, right? And people listen, can decide what they agree with, what they don't agree with,

where they have more questions, et cetera. But I think that this is probably the clearest way to do this, just given the complexities of what you're doing. So as long as you're a game, we'll play. Perfect. Let's do it. All right. So the first one is less to do with the Kin token or the sale and more to do with some previous comments you had. I saw a number of people tweeting, saying things that you previously said around, you know, Bitcoin is going to zero, or Ethereum is like dial up, maybe just clarify what, you know, the thought process behind some of these comments were. And if there's things that you still believe, or if your thoughts have changed. Perfect. That seems like a great place

to start. We've been thinking about crypto, just context, we've been thinking about crypto for a very long time. I was at one of the Bitcoin meetups in 2012. And so sometimes I definitely say these things that then get taken out of context. And I think that's true here. I did say, I think Bitcoin one day will go to zero. And I regret that. That was a mistake. What I was trying to demonstrate in a provocative way is that I think Bitcoin was first early, but that there will be many others. But that said, I think Bitcoin is a beautiful thing. I think Satoshi, whoever she, he, they are, has done, you know, one of the greatest things for humanity that is imaginable and, you know, should get the Nobel Peace Prize. And I truly mean that. I deeply mean that.

And I now see that the power of the story and how it started and the security behind it will make Bitcoin valuable and usable and around for years to come. and so instead what i was trying to say is i don't think bitcoin will make a great currency i think we'll make great gold but i don't think we'll make great currency so that's what i meant by the bitcoin line um so i just want to correct that that was a mistake i'm a huge fan of bitcoin and i think it's a an incredible technology and an incredible community um on ethereum Ethereum is dialed up again, just one soundbite pulled out of a very long interview and taken out of context. What I was trying to explain is just how slow Ethereum is and was.

I was trying to explain that even if we just wanted to give one kin to each of Kik's users, it would tie up the entire network for something like four weeks. We don't want them to earn it. We don't want them to spend it. We just give them one kin each. And, okay, Ethereum goes down for four weeks. You know, it's almost like the dial up era. And so people took that as a slight at Ethereum. It was not intended to be, again, Ethereum, amazing Bitcoin, but programmable smart contracts, you know, this global computer. I'm also a huge fan of Ethereum. I think the decentralized finance stuff is really interesting.

I was just trying to explain that it was too slow to work as money. And that's what we were trying to build. And so I made this, you know, hey, it's like we need high speed Internet, but this is sort of like dial up. So, again, great project. And that's what I meant by that comment. Got it. I think that those those clarifications are fair. Two other things that I see people kind of dredging up, if you will, from past comments.

One is very few people should be looking at blockchain. And then the other is this could be very valuable, right? Talking about the token. So maybe clarify both those. People should not be looking at blockchain and then also this could be very valuable. That's good. I get to go back and revisit my history of provocative comments for the last two years. Listen, you know better than most, the Internet does not forget.

At least it can be explained. For me, Twitter makes it easy. They just go and they find all the comments and put them all in one place and just send them back to you. It's helpful in that way. um so maybe let's start with the blockchain comment um you know there was an article that talked about me saying uh that i think blockchain um should only be used by for the most part is not uh usable and instead people should use a database instead so let me start there again sort of a provocative comment trying to make a point um what i was trying to say is this

is late 2017 maybe it's too that early 2018 i can't quite remember and this is at a time when people are saying we're going to use blockchain for everything you know this is when people are putting blockchain in their company name and then you know the stock price goes up this one like literally blockchain is going to do everything and it's going to solve every problem that the world has ever imagined and so what i was trying to do is trying to make a point that that is not correct. In a lot of these cases, and maybe even in most cases, a database will work better. A database will work better. And so I made that comment. But I think what people took it as was, oh, here's this guy who sold $98 million worth of kin now saying

that the blockchain doesn't matter. I did not say that. I said, in most cases, a database might be better but in many cases a blockchain will be truly revolutionary and you know look at the proof is in the pudding you know i kick we went all in on blockchain we went all in on launching a cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency being a fundamentally new business model for us and thousands of other app developers out there and so to be clear i think blockchain is absolutely revolutionary technology. Now, on the value side, going back through all these years, this one is over two years ago, maybe right around two years ago, I was speaking at a Bitcoin meetup, I believe, and this was after we had announced our intention to do Kin, but before we had released any details

on it. And what I said was what I was doing on stage is I was explaining crypto economics and why blockchain and Bitcoin was so revolutionary. You know, for the first time ever, you can guarantee the scarcity of a digital asset. You can never do that before Bitcoin and how that could create a new business model. How does that create a new business model? I was explaining the economics. Well, the price of any asset is a function of supply and demand. So now, if for the first time ever you can guarantee a fixed supply of a digital asset, then if demand goes up, price will go up. And so if there's a lot of demand, there will be a lot of value.

So people in hindsight have said, oh, you said this thing could become very valuable. No, I was explaining that this is how any cryptocurrency could become valuable, whether it's Bitcoin or Ethereum, et cetera. If a lot of people want it and there's only so much of it available, it will become more valuable. that is just basic economics 101 and if you actually go back and you watch that video you'll see i go on somebody says well can you guarantee the value of kin and i said very clearly no i cannot i absolutely cannot if demand for kin goes to zero then the price of kin will go to zero

and that's why this only works why we can't just be kick points on the blockchain because if it was only a currency used inside kick yeah it might be decentralized it runs on the blockchain but if we decide one day that hey we're not going to use this kin thing as our currency inside kick anymore demand would go to zero and therefore the value would go to zero so it's very clear that the value no i absolutely cannot guarantee the value if demand goes to zero value goes to zero and was even more clear that by the way if just kick were to adopt this this it's also worth zero so it's very important that this becomes a decentralized ecosystem And this becomes money for the digital world, not just in Kik, but in dozens or thousands of apps over time.

And that's what you'll be joining. That's what we will be building. Got it. Maybe one other thing in there. One other thing in there, because there was one other comment. But in the ideal of being transparent and addressing these comments of the past, I made a statement that said, and this could be very valuable for our investors. You know, if Kin were, so we created this new cryptocurrency, there's only going to be so much. Some of it we're going to sell in the token sale.

Some of it we're going to give to Kik. And then some of it we're going to give to the foundation to give it to all the other developers in the ecosystem. and so if kin becomes very valuable then the kin that we own that kick owns will become very valuable and that this could be a new business model for our investors and when i said investors i meant our equity investors the investors who had invested 120 million dollars by equity in the company and that this is how this could be a win for them as well because you know here at we're all a bit crazy win-win-wins you know it had to be a win for developers okay it's a fundamentally new business model had to be a win for users okay wait a second i'm actually now

getting paid for the value i bring to an app but it also had to be a win for the people who invested in kick from the early days so i was explaining how it could be a win for them as well you know if you know you look at satoshi i think satoshi mine something like seven percent of all bitcoin And that's a really valuable thing. And so if, you know, Kik owned 30% of Kin, that could be a really valuable thing as well. And maybe one day we could dividend it out to our equity investors. Got it. And so what do you say to the people who basically describe, you know, Kin as a shit coin and say, you know, hey, look, this is a last ditch effort by Kik to try to make money and nobody's using this. There's a lot of big statements in there. I'm trying to think through which order. So maybe let me start with, you know, this is a last ditch effort. it is true that at kick we have been very principled over the years we very much value

user privacy and we very much value being fair to our users and so the idea of taking and monetizing their attention without their consent and without their participation was something we refused to do. And this made it difficult because the only business model in consumer apps today is to monetize through advertising. So if you can't make money in advertising, and if advertising is the only way to make money,

then your only option is to go out of business unless you find another way. And this is the incredible thing to me. Necessity is the mother of invention, is we found another way. And this wasn't just some last-ditch effort. This was something that was contemplated, tested, built, tried, explored for something like six or seven years before we launched it. So this was not a thought we had one day. This is something that was years and years in the making. And if you look today, the proof is in the pudding. Telegram is launching their

own cryptocurrency. Facebook is launching their own cryptocurrency. If this was just some stupid last-ditch effort to make money in a way that wouldn't provide value to our users and would not be sustainable and work over time, then why is everybody else now today doing it? So that's what I would say to the last-ditch effort. It was the only option available. That is true but it was a great option and it's now being an option copied by many other big companies in the space for a reason um what should be the next question nobody uses it nobody uses it so this is what we've been trying to do for the last eight years is how do you create a cryptocurrency that people use as a currency how do you create a cryptocurrency people are going to

use as a currency so part of it this is let's not build money for the physical world let's build money for the digital world part of this is all the technology to make that possible listen it has to go through really fast has to be highly scalable that has to use uh has to require no fees we have to set up the right incentive system like why would other developers adopt this okay well let's build a mining war but for developers we have to do all these sorts of different things but what has been super exciting is that today it is working okay in the last month over 1 million people have earned kin on chain in custody of their own private keys across these 40 different apps from 40 different companies and of those users over 300 000 have also spent kin in the

last 30 days to us this is super exciting you know we wanted to build a currency that people would use as a currency and so you know there's all sorts of misinformation out there around you know how much of these transactions are real in any particular blockchain how much are unreal you know you go to blocktivity.org whatever it is and kin is the number two most used blockchain there i believe eos is number one but i look at that metric i'm like yeah but in each of those including a can we don't know how many of those are you know earns or spends or account creations how much of that is trading versus utility so it's a bad metric and so this is why we have published the actual earning and spending by real human beings to king.org stats and when we've been

going around and talking to top people in the crypto space whether it's you know leading investors in the space some of the most well-known investors in the world in crypto or some of the ceos in the space some of the largest companies of crypto in the world when they hear those stats whoa wait a second a million people earned kin in the last month and over 300 000 people spent Kin in the last month, the thing they then say to us is that is the most used thing in crypto. That is the most used thing in crypto. Once you take out trading, there is nothing even remotely close

to the utility of Kin. I'm not trying to put down any other project. I've met a lot of people in this space and they are great. This is an amazing industry. It feels like the early days of mobile. but when it comes to actual usage um most people talk about how people will use it in the future whereas all i need to do is show a graph and i think that's really exciting and so what would you say to the people who you know kind of go along with that talk track that you hinted at where like yeah 300 000 people spent it but those aren't real transactions or those aren't real people that's the interesting thing is nobody says that um you know actually at this point

most people are getting very excited about can't if i'm able to sit down with somebody or other people in the ecosystem sit down with people they're very quickly able to explain like this is real these are real users you can go talk to any of the developers in the ecosystem and they will all confirm the same thing for you so i don't think that's actually been a challenge nobody when get that far people go no i can see it on the blockchain i can see it in these apps i can see it with these developers these are real people earning and spending i think the hard part has been it's just so different you know kin is is one of the few projects that's focused on adoption not on technology um and i think part of this is just our history you know we went through

the mobile gauntlet and survived you know there were millions of apps created and today there are only a couple hundred left and we are one of those couple hundred it's amazing that we got through that gauntlet but to get through the gauntlet requires four steps you know step one starts with technology you have to build technology that works step two you have to turn it into a product that people can actually use step three is you have to find market fit and it's not just that people could use it they are using it and step four is you have to set up the whole thing so that you can compete so that there's these competitive modes now i'd say most of crypto today is very focused on the technology yeah yeah one day people could use it like this we'll use

it like this but first we have to get the technology right and that makes sense you know the technology is very complicated stuff and you know there's lots of different pieces and ways to approach it and trade off so it makes sense that people are talking about the technology but with kin for us the technology is just an enabler um you know so you look at our blockchain strategy for example it's like you started ethereum then you're on stellar now you have your own blockchain you it's like you guys can't even decide um it's not that we can't decide it's that we need the technology to serve the product to serve the market and to serve how we are going to compete and so i think that's been the thing that's different about kin that people

don't understand in the beginning it's you guys aren't really focused on the technology at all you're actually not really focused on the product you're focused on market fit you know you have over a million people earning it over 300 000 people spending it across 40 apps and growing and you're focused on competitive dynamics you know setting up this ecosystem where all these developers adopt a common currency such that it's not just a way for all of us to make money a fundamentally new business model but it's also a new way for us to cooperate you know now we all we all hold the same kin so if i can help you share some of my user with you for example then you do better if you do better kin does better and kin does better we all do better and so this

is the thing that's been different for us is we just we just look very different to people who has spent the last you know five six years just focused on technology got it and then that brings us to uh to the big one i think i saw a couple of people tweeting this earlier today um look it's all great there's people who use it uh you you know kind of clearly articulate all these different ideas but at the end of the day kick or i'm sorry ken is just a security right and so uh kind of the the current situation with uh with regulators uh isn't gonna matter right so kind of how do you think about or respond to those that just say, look, this is just a security? So a few things on that. So first of all, I did a podcast with Laura Shin just recently,

and it was both myself and Patrick Gibbs. Patrick Gibbs is a partner at Cooley's and the lead litigator for us. So if you want sort of a specific deep dive on the legalities of securities versus non-securities uh i i encourage you to go listen to that podcast but i'll do my best i'm not a lawyer but i will do my best to to make it a bit more understandable and to explain um what i think is really important is to understand what actually happened with the howie test we we all hear about the howie test you know and has these four prongs, and if you meet all four prongs, then it's a security. But what is interesting and important is to go back and actually understand the history of what actually happened

with Howey. And so I think it'd be worth taking some time to explain that here today. So what Howey did, William John Howey, an entrepreneur in Florida in the 1930s, is he owned a bunch of orange groves and what he did is he took that those orange groves and he split them into plots and what he said to people is hey listen i have all these these plots where we grow oranges and um you should come buy one of these plots but if you do what i can do for you is uh i can run the business so you know you bought a plot but i'll farm it i'll grow the oranges. I'll take the oranges to market. I'll sell the oranges on the market. I'll get the cash and then I'll come back and I'll give you the cash. You can expect profits, cash to come from

me. And the investor said, wow, that sounds pretty great. So if I give you some money today, you're going to give me more money tomorrow. Like how much profits should I expect? and how he said last year we made 20 profit so you can expect me to give you 20 more money back than what you give me and actually we think the profit margin will be even higher this year and so the investor goes wow that sounds really good um how do i know you're going to give me the money if i give you the money today why won't you just run away with it how he says no problem We'll sign an investment contract that says we are in business together. You're going to give me money and I'm going to give you more money back.

So the investor says, great. And they signed the investment contract and they got into business together. Okay. That was determined by the Supreme Court to be a security. And that makes sense because Howie and the investor were getting into business together. That is not what we did. And that is not what the majority of other crypto networks are doing. Okay.

Here's what they're doing. And here's what we did. It would be like Howie saying to an investor, listen, I have a bunch of land and I'm selling some. And the investor says, wow, great. I, you know, I'll buy the land for you. Will you farm it for me? Nope.

We will not farm it for you. will not farm it for you, will not take the oranges to the market, and we will not be giving you any money. We'll sell you the property, you give me the money, and I hand over the keys, and that is it. We will not be in business together. Now, the investor might say, well, you know, that's true, but maybe I could sell this land in the future, and maybe somebody will want to buy it for more money. And Howie, I know that, you know, you have a bunch of orange plots in this uh this valley here and maybe this whole area is going to become very valuable you know i might be able to sell this for more money in the future and how he

says listen i don't know i can i cannot guarantee that you cannot expect that from you cannot expect that you'll get that from me in fact the one thing i can guarantee is you may or may not profit but i can guarantee not a dollar of those profits will come from me we will not be in business together that is what we have done that is what many other crypto networks have done and it is clear that we are not getting into business together and that these are not securities and there's lots of case law to support this and we open sourced our wells response it's called in january something that's never been done before, which was a 30-odd page document explaining why we view these clearly as non-securities, citing much case law.

And there's lots of examples, for example, lots of examples where developers, for example, were creating new neighborhoods, providing lots of the infrastructure, but because they were not getting in business together, these were not securities. So it's very clear to us, there are many reasons these are non-securities, you know, Forget the fact that, for example, the 1933 Securities and Exchange Act explicitly exempts currencies from the definition of security. So forget all that stuff. It's just clear that we are not getting into business together and therefore these are not securities. Got it. And so maybe just for those that don't know, give a quick two minutes on what the regulators response has been to the position you guys have taken and kind of what what is to come next? This has been the challenge.

So maybe let me rewind and give some context. So we never heard from the SEC until three days after our token sale. Okay, so we announced it in May, became public in May. We did the token sale in September. And it wasn't until three days later that we got a very nice, friendly reach out from the SEC saying, hey, see, you did a token sale. We'd like to learn more. would you mind coming in and helping us learn? Seems nice enough. Of course, of course we will

help you learn because we see all the innovation and the potential of this technology on one side, but we also see all the ways it's being abused on the other side. So if there's some way we can be helpful to help you create guidance that allows the innovation that also makes it very hard for the people who are trying to abuse it, we would be happy to do that. Okay, so we start having these meetings, we make some presentations, we start asking for information, we provide information, then there's subpoenas, but don't worry, subpoenas are just to make sure the information is correct and that we can use the information for our understanding of the future. Actually, there's now formal testimony, please come to Washington, culminating in what is a

Wells notice over a year later, which is their intention to recommend to the commission to file an action against us unless we can find a settlement. And the challenge in this is we understand the very difficult situation that the SEC is in. We do. It's tough. They're at the center of trying to shut down abuse, protect the public, but at the same time allow innovation in this next mega trend of technology. And so we really do understand the tough situation they're in. And that's why we spent 18 months working with them. We've actually spent over $5 million working with them because we're working very hard to find a win-win with them. But what is very important to us and to everybody else in the industry is for there to be a clear

line when these things are for sure no longer securities and so when we look at kin today we said okay you know there's all these other items but at a minimum will you make it clear that kin today the currency that's been earned by over a million people in the last month has been spent by over 300,000 people in the last month in 40 apps from 40 different independent companies on a decentralized blockchain or validation is run by seven independent companies, will you confirm that that at least is not a security? And they have been unable to do that. They've been unable to say Kin today for sure is not a security. And so that's been the challenge for us, because if Kin were a security, it would be unusable to currency. And this is why they're exempt.

You know, if every time I wanted to buy something from the Apple App Store, I had to go to my broker dealer and buy a share of Apple stock, nobody would do it. And so it's very important for us and very important for everybody in the industry that there is a clear line when these things are not securities. And if Kin, a currency being used by a million people, earned by a million, spent by over 300,000, 40 apps, if even that is not just a currency, then what is? And so that's been the part that's been very challenging for us and where we said, you know, we have spent a lot of time trying to work with you. We have spent a lot of money trying to work with you. But this is now becoming a competitive handicap on the global stage. and this is where we finally said enough is enough for us in the industry is you know we we look at coinbase and we really empathize with them you know here coinbase comes out early they build

an amazing product amazing team but they're operating in this incredibly strict regulatory environment and sometimes that's good you know there's lots of things that are good about regulation but there are some things that have made it very hard to operate and then what you have is just two years ago, Binance comes out of nowhere and says, you know, hey, love what you're doing, Coinbase. We're going to do that everywhere, just not in the United States. And that's going to let us move way faster. And that's what we've seen today. Today, Binance has replaced Coinbase as the most used exchange in the world. And both of these are great companies. Binance is a great company. Coinbase is a great company. It's neither of their fault. But Coinbase has had to operate

with this fundamental handicap. And as a result, they're no longer number one. And that really concerns us that we could get financed too. That somebody could say, hey, PN, great idea. We're going to do that everywhere except in the US and race ahead. And that's not just a concern for us. That's a concern for everybody else in the industry. And so the more we talk to people from these projects the more we realize this is happening to everybody it's just nobody's talking about it and there's all this divide and conquer behind the scenes if we allow this to continue we are going to lose out on one of the biggest opportunities of our lifetime we cannot allow that to happen it is time to defend crypto and so that's what we announced is we announced

defendcrypto.org a fund a defense fund initially for kin because kin we are ready to go to court And Kin could become the new Howey Test. You know, maybe one day it'll be called the Kin Test. And so we put $5 million of Bitcoin, Ether, and Kin in a Coinbase custody account. And then also opened up for contributions for any of the other currencies that Coinbase custody supports. Got it. And so the thought process here behind Defend Crypto is this is a defense fund where you guys have put capital in. Other people can go ahead and contribute.

And then what happens if you guys get to the end of this and there's money left over? Is that something that you guys take with kick? Do you return it to people who donated? So this is the idea. The idea is to set up a defense fund for all of crypto. so we're putting the first five million in to take on the sec in court to create a new how we test with kin and that's going to be in a very expensive thing we don't think it will cost more than five million dollars but it might and if it does we want to make sure the capital is there

because to to fight this case properly because this case could determine the future of cryptocurrency usage and innovation in the united states but once we get this case behind it we're incredibly confident in our circumstances our facts and that we are not a security and have not offered an investment contract but there will be other projects as well and so this is where it will roll into the next project that needs to be defended we have yet to decide how we will select that next project. Maybe a not-for-profit will be set up. Maybe we'll set up a DAO. We haven't decided yet, but that's what we hope to do as this Kin case plays out, is to set up this fund, not just for Kin, but for everybody who's trying to innovate and include

the United States. Got it. And so I guess, you know, kind of in closing here, what would you say to the people who are looking at this and asking why? Like, why are you going to such great legs uh to fight this and not settle um you know what's the logic here the logic is we see this once in a lifetime opportunity uh we think blockchains and cryptocurrencies are going to fundamentally change the world society and how we organize and everything's for the most part it's going really well um the technology is working people are adopting people are using it the first time people are using the cryptocurrency as money and we're seeing all this other excitement in other projects as well and all this other great progress and there's a reason why we are coming

out of crypto winter because people are saying wow this is gonna go you know this cryptocurrency thing not just can but all these projects this is going to work there's only one thing though holding us back and that is clear regulation and talking to other projects this is the part that has become so clear to us is we have all if you want to include the united states we have lost sight of who the customer is we are no longer building for the customer or the developer we are now all building for the regulator the regulator has become the customer you know how should we do consensus well the technology we can do this way and then it will be trustless for developers this way yeah but what would the sec think about that yeah they

might not like if we do consensus this way what if we did it this other way how should we do the economics well if we do this way the economics would work out like this but yeah and then we get developers to do that that could work really well but but what will the sec think yeah the sec might not like us doing economics that way. Maybe we should do it a different way. The question inside each of these projects, each of these companies, probably the most popular question in the entire company is what will the SEC think? The SEC has become the customer. And if we continue down that path where every single discussion ends with a discussion on what will the sec thinks and maybe we should find another way then we are going to get financed

we are going to miss out while the rest of the world races ahead and with an opportunity that big we cannot allow that we need to come together all these projects all these investors everybody who's in the space who sees the power in the future crypto put aside our quasi religious differences of which project we support and which one we don't, which one's a great coin and which one's a shit coin. We need to put aside our differences and realize that we are being divided and conquered. And we need to say enough is enough.

We need to come together and defend crypto. We need to fight back. Yeah, look, I think that there's a lot of people who are paying attention to what you guys are doing and frankly cheering for you guys to help get some clarity, right? I really do think that it is fairly obvious to a large percentage of the population that's paying attention here, there are advantages to building companies, products, and services outside of the United States,

given some of the regulatory uncertainty, right? And hopefully we can quickly get to some of that clarity and it's done in a timely fashion so that a lot of that innovation and entrepreneurship comes back, right? Because I think that's the important part here is regulatory arbitrage is a strategy, but it's only a strategy when the regulations are onerous in many cases, right? And so, you know, we're entering a very interesting and frankly, a little weird world where technology, regulation, geopolitics, money, right, power, control, all of these things are coming to an intersection. And I think that you and the team at Kickin' Ken are at the forefront of many of this. So I really appreciate you taking the time to go over all of this and frankly play the devil's advocate game with me, which was probably more fun for me than you. But we'll have to bring you back on in the next few weeks or months to get an update as to how things are going. Awesome. Beautifully said. Thank you for having me.

Yeah. And Ted, just real quick, where can people go find out more about the defense fund? To find out more, go to defendcrypto.org and you'll see everything listed there as well as all the contributions, all the history, the timelines, and appreciate your support. Awesome, man. Sounds great. We'll talk soon. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. to review simply go to the off the chain homepage scroll down until you see the five blank stars taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts i appreciate you listening and see you next

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