$3 Million Fund to Create 25 Marketplaces for Kik Messenger's Token

It's a contrarian view, but it's the central idea behind one of last year's largest initial coin offerings, which raised $98 million selling ethereum-based tokens created specifically for the messaging app company Kik.

To jumpstart a digital market around its code, the company announced Tuesday that it's committing up to $3 million in fiat and crypto to enlist developers in creating up to 25 marketplaces that only use kin, a cryptocurrency valued at roughly $100 million.

While the Kik app is a natural place to host such markets, projects don't have to be built there per se, according to the newly released terms of the Kin Developer Program.

The initiative "Financially incentivizes developers to create natively with kin, bringing us closer to our goal of becoming the most used cryptocurrency in the world," Ted Livingston, CEO of Kik, said in a press release.

According to the Kin Ecosystem Foundation, the non-profit that oversees kin, the deadline for developers to apply to participate is August 10.

A spokesman for the foundation confirmed that these payments will be in lieu of payments from the Kin Rewards Engine, which is not yet live.

In the original vision for the cryptocurrency, developers would create marketplaces, and smart contracts would reward them periodically in newly released kin tokens based on the amount of activity that took place.

During a conference for the token in April, Livingston described a vision of an ecosystem of marketplaces for purely digital goods in which regular people could both earn and spend kin without ever thinking about converting it fiat.

Still, Livingston has repeatedly said kin needs to achieve three things to succeed.

First, it needed a scaleable blockchain; to integrate the Kik app with kin; and finally, it needed to grow its ecosystem.