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Here’s What Kik Users Need to Know About Kin Cryptocurrency – The Mac Observer

Chat app Kik has announced the creation of its own cryptocurrency, called Kin. Short for kinship, Kik wants the Kin cryptocurrency to become the de facto standard for its platform. It will benefit Kik users and developers alike. If it proves to be a popular solution, it could become a viable alternative to Facebooks advertising business, as well as its marketplace. Heres what Kik users need to know.

The Mac Observer has a guide on Bitcoin, which is the first and currently most popular form of cryptocurrency. Its a form of decentralized currency, meaning there is no central bank or government in control of it. Its value lies in the integrity of the system underlying itthe blockchainas well as the amount of time people are willing to invest in it.

The crypto part means that its a mostly anonymous currency. Every individual Bitcoin has an address, which is sent between digital wallets that also have addresses. Your name isnt associated with your transactions, but transactions are publicly logged and available to view by anyone. That makes is pseudonymous.

Kik is creating its own form of cryptocurrency, which will take place with an ICO, or initial coin offering. On the technical side, Kin will be created as an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is another cryptocurrency created from the ground upfor exactly the kinds of things Kik wants.

Kik users will use Kin to pay for experiences, products and services available on the Kik platform. You can earn and spend Kin without usingtraditional currency (fiat currency in cryptocurrency terms), or buy/sell Kin through Ethereum itself. Kik users can earn Kin in a variety of ways.

Some examples might be interacting with a chatbot or other services. Brands could use Kin to reward people for performing tasks, such as posting about the brand on social media. But the potential for this is much bigger than Earn 100 Kin for taking this 5 minute survey!

Once Kin has been in circulation for some time, Kik could create a marketplace for people to buy and sell goods using only Kin. Users could even send person-2-person payments and send Kin to friends and family. The possibilities are endless.

Kin will also benefit developers. In an interview with TechCrunch, Kik CEO Ted Livingston said:

Thebroader motivation is that it is really hard for independent developers to compete with huge companies. On one side, you see digital services, on the other they are being owned and controlled by fewer companies because they are the only ones to monetize at scale using advertising. Youtry to sell things but you are trying to sell to consumers who think everything should be free. Even if a few companies canbreak through, the giants turn to copy and crush. We think this is leading to a future with less choice and freedom for consumers [and] for thefirst time ever we can present a potential solution to change all that.

Developers would take a percentage of the daily reward in proportion to the number of transactions their service was responsible for. Thiscreates a reward engine, a beautiful network effect, where the bigger the daily reward, the more services come into the ecosystem, which drives up the daily reward and more digital services.Very quickly this could become a very powerful economic force to bring developers to.

Mr. Livingston is hoping that the more developers push Kin into their services, the more users will be incentivized to use Kin, creating a virtuous circle for Kik.And the more people there are using Kin, big brands and advertisers will take a closer look and invest in the system.

Right now Kik is in the very early stages of development, but the company wants to launch the cryptocurrency system within the app in the coming summer. Next year, Kin will become available to third-party developers for use within their own services. To learn more, you can download the white paper.

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Startups raise cash with cryptocurrency – SFGate

Begin Slideshow 25

Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez, Associated Press

Stories behind Bay Area tech company names

Stories behind Bay Area tech company names

Facebook Originally called "The Facebook," the social network gets its name from a document with information about staff and students known as a "facebook" that was handed to freshmen at Harvard University.

Facebook Originally called "The Facebook," the social network gets its name from a document with information about staff and students known as a "facebook" that was handed to freshmen at Harvard University.

Adobe Adobe was named for the Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, which ran behind Adobe co-founder John Warnocks home.

Adobe Adobe was named for the Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, which ran behind Adobe co-founder John Warnocks home.

Palantir Palantir is named after the crystal ball that's used for communications and seeing into the future in J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

Palantir Palantir is named after the crystal ball that's used for communications and seeing into the future in J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

Jawbone When Jawbone was known as "Aliph," it sold a headset called "Jawbone." That Jawbone rested on the user's jawbone. Aliph eventually adopted the product's name as a company name.

Jawbone When Jawbone was known as "Aliph," it sold a headset called "Jawbone." That Jawbone rested on the user's jawbone. Aliph eventually adopted the product's name as a company name.

Startups raise cash with cryptocurrency

Its too late to invest in Airbnb but a company that bills itself as the Airbnb of cloud computer storage is raising cash and anyone with an Internet connection can get in on the action.

Storj Labs is selling digital coins at 50 cents apiece to raise $30 million in an early-stage financing round. In just five days, hundreds of contributors signed up for a piece of what they hope will be the next Silicon Valley unicorn. But theres a catch unlike traditional venture capital investments, the tokens dont confer a claim on Storjs equity or future profits.

Instead, the tokens value derives from their utility in the firms app, by providing access to data storage on a distributed network. They are the latest entry in the growing ledger of cryptocurrencies, digital coins that unlock myriad apps across the computing world. The coins can be traded on dozens of online exchanges, and demand for all sorts of them has exploded as people speculate on the next big tech startup.

The average investor is missing out on the Ubers and Airbnbs of the world, said Bart Stephens, a managing partner at Blockchain Capital, a venture capital firm that has invested in blockchain-related startups since 2012. If the next Uber decides to issue tokens, that would be an opportunity for more investors to get access to the most exciting technologies out there.

The Storj sale is known as an initial coin offering, a model of finance spreading across the tech sector. Investors spent $332 million on tokens in the past year, more than double what venture investors handed over in seed rounds, according to data compiled by coin-focused blog the Control. The haul is slated to hit $600 million in 2017, it says, adding to a market for tokens thats nearly tripled in a year.

Such offerings are possible thanks to blockchain, the catchall term for a digital ledger that promises incorruptible storage of financial transactions. Banks and stock exchanges have spent millions on it, looking for ways to cut the costs for transferring money or recording equity sales. One of the latest to back the technology was the chief executive officer of Fidelity Investments, Abigail Johnson. Most famously, its the technology that underpins bitcoin just as it does for every token offered in a coin offering.

Their huge increase in popularity has more than a few detractors warning of a bubble, worried that the allure of finding the next tech lottery ticket is fueling rampant speculation. The concern is particularly acute at a time when investors are fretting about stretched valuations for tech startups, with the likes of Uber commanding multibillion-dollar price tags even as they burn through cash.

Take Gnosis, a prediction market application based on the Ethereum blockchain that raised $12.5 million in 12 minutes on April 24, resulting in a market capitalization of almost $300 million. It generates no revenue and has little more than a white paper describing what it intends to do. Yet its tokens, which would allow users to bet on things such as election outcomes, soared eightfold in the three weeks since May 2, giving it a valuation of over $2 billion more than the average Russell 2000 Index stock.

Gnosis growth is just part of the craze thats gripped the cryptocurrency market in the last month, with the price of bitcoin gaining more than 30 percent last week, to more than $2,500. That has pushed the market capitalization of digital currencies more than 50 percent higher to more than $90 billion.

Even after that, the market is still relatively small, though its taking steps toward maturity as the boom in coin offerings spreads. There are places to track historical prices and volume, and reports on individual offerings to help prospective buyers assess a firms prospects.

The offerings happen outside the purview of regulators quite by design because technically, the coins are part of the app and not securities. Initial coin offerings dont have disclosure requirements, and the issuer can accept an unlimited number of investors, instead of the limit of 99 vetted investors in traditional venture funding rounds.

But the marketplace has also been a breeding ground for scams, and some coins have turned out to be vulnerable to attacks. Hackers were able to steal $50 million from a fund called Decentralized Autonomous Organization after it raised $150 million in the biggest offering ever in April 2016.

For entrepreneurs, the appeal is obvious. A white paper published online replaces weeks of pitches to venture capital firms, followed by an online auction that can take minutes. The technology can be poked and prodded by geeks around the world, providing a depth of expertise often missing at even the best tech firms.

You dont have to limit yourself, said Jae Kwon, who raised $16.8 million in a coin sale for Cosmos, which provides custodian-like service for transactions in different blockchains. There are just not that many VCs and theyre not experts. People who contributed to our fundraiser are the experts.

Camila Russo is a Bloomberg writer. Email: crusso15@bloomberg.net

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University of Michigan Demonstrates Novel Memory Disaggregation Technology – TOP500 News

The lack of memory capacity in traditional computer clusters is a significant limitation to application performance in the datacenter. A new memory disaggregation technology developed at the University of Michigan is designed to help alleviate this critical obstacle.

The problem is common to many datacenter environments, from HPC clusters to cloud server farms. In general, DRAM capacity is often a limiting factor in these scaled-out systems since compute power has leapt ahead of memory advancements. Even in cases where the total amount of memory across the entire system is adequate, local demands may overwhelm (or underwhelm) particular servers.

Researchers at the University of Michigan think they have found an answer, at least for clusters whose networks support Remote Direct Memory Access (RMDA). They claim that the software they have developed, known as Infiniswap, can boost the memory utilization in a cluster by up to 47 percent, which can lead to financial savings of up to 27 percent.

In a nutshell, the software tracks memory utilization across the cluster, and when a server runs out of memory, it borrows memory from other servers with spare capacity. Although remote memory access is going to be slower than accessing local memory, its going to be much faster than swapping the data out to disk, the usual method used to free up extra space.

According to the researchers, the Infiniswap software that does this is itself distributed, so can scale with the size of the cluster. Other than network gear that supports RDMA, Infiniswap isnt dependent on any particular type of hardware and doesnt require modifications to the applications.

The researchers tested Infiniswap on a 32-node cluster with typical workloads that stress the memory subsystem, specifically data-intensive applications that ranged from in-memory databases such as VoltDB and Memcached to popular big data software Apache Spark, PowerGraph and GraphX. They found that the software improved throughput by 4 to 16 times, and tail latency (the speed of the slowest operation) by a factor of 61.

According to project lead Mosharaf Chowdhury, Infiniswap wouldnt be practical without todays faster networks. "Now, we have reached the point where most data centers are deploying low-latency RDMA networks of the type previously only available in supercomputing environments," he explained.

Infiniswap is open source and isavailable in the GitHub repository. A paper providing a detailed description of the software and how it works is available here.

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How And Why IBM Can Challenge Microsoft Office And Adobe Creative Cloud – Seeking Alpha

The full potential of International Business Machines (IBM) in the $148 billion cloud computing market can be achieved if it targets Microsofts (MSFT) leadership in Enterprise SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). The Enterprise Collaboration market is predicted to grow from $26 billion last year to $49 billion by 2021.

Productivity and collaboration apps like Microsoft Office 365 and Googles (GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) G Suite dominated last years list of most used cloud apps and SaaS offerings. IBMs tepid collaboration effort is still limited to providing social networks. The IBM Verse email client is not going to help IBM become relevant in enterprise collaboration anytime soon. Corporate employees need groupware productivity programs that will let them create documents, not just exchange email messages.

In the enterprise SaaS industry, IBM only leads in the System Infrastructure niche. On the other hand, the more diversified portfolio (Skype, Dynamics, and Office 365) of Microsoft made it a leader in CRM, Collaboration, and Other Enterprise Applications.

Enterprise SaaS leaders Google, Microsoft, and Adobe (ADBE) greatly outperformed IBMs stock due to their millions of Office and Creative Cloud subscribers. Office 365 has 26.2 million subscribers and Adobe has more than 9 million Creative Cloud subscribers. Googles G Suite has 3 million business subscribers.

The three-year chart below illustrates how Big Blue is fading away, eating dust behind its more nimble rivals in cloud computing.

(Source: Google Finance)

Tardiness in joining the SaaS race can worsen IBMs 20 consecutive quarters of revenue declines. As per Gartners forecast, SaaS and Business Process Services are going to generate more revenue than IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service). Big Blue needs the revenue from software products like Office 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud to augment its IBM Cloud infrastructure service.

Cloud advertising is the biggest segment but I believe IBM doesnt know anything about selling ads. On the other hand, IBM has decades of experience selling software to companies. SaaS therefore is IBM's best expansion move.

Buy The Tools To Fight Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Cloud

IBM became a leader in private cloud hosting partly thanks to its $2 billion buyout of SoftLayer in 2013. SoftLayer was an early-bird provider of private cloud services in 2010. Management should also consider making an acquisition to push IBMs debut in Collaboration SaaS. It will take some time to build competent rival products to Office 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud software suite. Acquiring other firms with proven products that compete with Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and After Effects is the faster route.

Adobes 2016 revenue from Creative Cloud subscriptions was $4.58 billion. Selling design software is obviously more lucrative than IBMs Watson AI initiative. Using an average $9.99/month per user fee, the 26.2 million subscribers of Office 365 likely contribute more than $3 billion annually to Microsofts coffers.

The huge economic opportunity in collaboration software services is why Salesforce (CRM) paid $750 million to acquire Quip last year. Quips only product was a mobile-focused word processor with chat and spreadsheet creation. IBM has $10 billion in cash and equivalents. Why not use some of that idle money to acquire other firms which will help it compete with Microsoft, Google, and Adobe in SaaS.

Who To Buy?

Ideal acquisition targets are Serif, Corel Corporation, and China-based KingSoft. KingSoft is the firm behind the mega-hit WPS Office software product that touts 1.25 billion installations. WPS Office looks and feels like Microsoft Office 2017. It's quickly becoming a favorite among small businesses. Serifs Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are considered by many as the best alternatives to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator CC.

Corel touts the complete package though. It has a long list of products that will let IBM simultaneously compete with Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Autodesks (ADSK) AutoCAD line of products.

I am long IBM.

(Source: Corel/Wikipedia)

Conclusion

IBMs revenue has declined for the 20th consecutive quarter. Desperate times call for desperate measures. The current cloud and AI initiatives of IBM has failed to offset the declining sales of its legacy products. IBM urgently needs to retool itself as a legitimate SaaS provider like Microsoft, Google, and Adobe.

Selling more affordable alternatives to Office 365, G Suite, and Adobe Creative Cloud could help IBM offset declining sales of its legacy hardware and software products.

Disclosure: I am/we are long MSFT, ADBE, GOOG.

I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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Bitcoin Is Twice as Valuable as Gold Right Now – Fortune

Photograph by George FreyGettyGeorge Frey Getty Images

A single bitcoin is now roughly twice as valuable as an ounce of gold.

The most recent flurry of buying helped send the price of bitcoin up over $2,600 in trading Friday, while the value of gold has stayed at about $1,267 per ounce. Bitcoin's value has since pared its gains, and traded at about $2,433 midday Friday.

Just two months ago, bitcoin only just inched above the value of gold .

The surge comes as the cryptocurrency gains legitimacy in countries such as Japan, and Chinese regulators look to be growing more tolerant of bitcoin . Despite bitcoin's volatility, some investors have also come to see the currency as a good place to store funds in times of geopolitical uncertainty.

Gold, too, is known to be a "safe haven" asset investors buy the precious metal when turmoil looks just around the bend. But while gold has risen 10% this year, bitcoin has risen 153%.

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Coinbase Suffers Outages Amid Bitcoin Surge – Fortune

Coinbase said on Thursday it suffered outages this week as the bitcoin exchange saw "unprecedented traffic and trading," with the digital currency hitting record levels.

Bitcoin fell as much as 6.5% to $2,263.72 at around 1:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, but rebounded shortly after to hit a fresh all-time high of $2,760.10.

Bitcoin hit a record on the BitStamp platform on Wednesday, driven by an uptick in demand for crypto-assets, with the creation of new tokens to raise funding for start-ups using blockchain, the underlying technology behind bitcoin.

So far this year, the price of bitcoin has more than doubled.

Coinbase, the world's largest bitcoin company with operations in 32 countries, said the heavy traffic had caused outages at its website as well. The exchange said it was working to resolve the issues.

Get Data Sheet , Fortune s technology newsletter.

Problems that Coinbase's platform experienced earlier this week, including card verification failures and slow load times, were resolved, its status page showed.

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Wall Street laughed at a call for bitcoin at $25000but after a 400% surge, the laughter is fading – MarketWatch

Yuk it up! But will Yves Lamoureux have the laugh last?

Back in February when one bitcoin was worth $994, the owner of an eponymously named boutique advisory firm in Montreal forecast that the cryptocurrency would hit $25,000 over the next 10 or 15 yearsa figure that is both outlandish and mind-boggling, and it was met with more than just a dollop of skepticism and derision.

However, as the digital currency has surged a breathtaking 400% over the past year, Wall Street may be apt to take Lamoureuxs call a little more seriously. At least, thats the hope of the 54-year-old former retail broker and trader who established what he describes as macroeconomic research firm, Lamoureux & Co., about four years ago.

I was talking to institutions and just a few months back some were skeptical for whatever reason, now that this thing has shot up, now they are ready to listen and they are ready to buy [bitcoins], Lamoureux told MarketWatch.

Read: Opinion: Three reasons to fear the coming crash in bitcoins

On Thursday, a single bitcoin BTCUSD, -11.12% surpassed the record level of $2,700 before retreating back to around $2,462.57 in recent trade. That swing, perhaps, highlights the volatility inherent in the digital currency that has reclaimed the worlds attention three years after spectacularly imploding following Mt. Goxone of the first and formerly one of the largest bitcoin exchanges, which abruptly halted bitcoin withdrawals after a security breach.

Against that backdrop, doubts about bitcoins staying power this time around, and its ability to clamber to fresh records unimpeded, would be logical.

But Lamoureux makes the case that this time it is different. His argument is that bitcoinand its underpinning, the blockchainis in the early stages of a long-term uptrend that he likened to the nascence of the dot-com era.

From the ashes [of the dot-com bubble], we got the real take of what was to come. You can go on your smartphone and do anything you want. Ten or 15 years back, we would not have been able to imagine that, he said. Thats what we have with bitcoin now, he said.

That may be an apt analogy since hes expecting the run-up for the digital currency to be interrupted by more than a few bumps in the road, but hes still uncategorically bullish on the asset.

Lamoureux also touts the view that bitcoins moves appear to be uncorrelated to other assets, like the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.01% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.01% 10-year Treasury notes TMUBMUSD10Y, -0.31% or gold GCM7, +0.88% In other words, bitcoin doesnt have a significant relationship with other asset classes, moving independent of them. Thats a feature that may appeal to investors looking to diversify their portfolios to mitigate losses in other investment segments, Lamoureux says.

What I am basically trying to tell my clients is that [bitcoin] is noncorrelated asset to anything that they own in their portfolio, he said.

Of course, bitcoins reemergence can make it a playground that is rampant for speculation. And there are some who believe that moves in the relatively thinly traded cryptocurrency are being manipulated by a handful of owners with hefty bitcoin positions.

Still, the Qubecois is far from the only one bullish on bitcoin and attempting to proselytize those uninitiated.

John McAfee, of antivirus software fame, is calling for bitcoin to hit 3,000 soon. Bitcoin has enormous momentum, McAfee said. MGT Capital Investments Inc., his cybersecurity-focused investment fund MGTI, -9.62% is ramping up its operations to increase its position in bitcoin.

Meanwhile, Cathie Wood, chief executive officer of ARK Investment Management, told MarketWatchs Ryan Vlastelica that bitcoin is underappreciated: Weve watched the volatility in bitcoin ever since we first bought it, and were not blind to the fact that prices are driven by speculation to a certain degree. However, we think its utility is very underappreciated, and that there isnt as much speculation as people think, necessarily.

Earlier this week, billionaire and Fidelity Investments scion, Abigail Johnson, said bitcoin has some wrinkles to iron out before it becomes more widely adopted, but envisioned a rosy future for the digital currency. I like to think that huge new markets and products will be built on these platforms, she said at Consensus, a conference put on by digital currency site CoinDesk.

Bitcoins recent rally has coincided with its growing acceptance by regulators. A law passed by Japanese lawmakers earlier this year that allows financial institutions to participate in the digital-currency market took effect in April.

Meanwhile, bitcoin may have garnered additional legitimacy recently after the Securities and Exchange Commission said it would reassess its earlier ruling in March that effectively killed the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust, which had been closely watched for signs that the digital currency could underpin an exchange-traded funda potentially bullish move for its price.

To be sure, the recent and unrelenting focus on bitcoin should send one clear message to wannabe investorseven if Lamoureux and other digital currency enthusiasts are correct in their predictions: Be wary.

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Even the world’s largest bitcoin exchange couldn’t handle this week’s cryptocurrency boom – TechCrunch

For thoseoperating a bitcoin exchange where people can buy cryptocoins youd imagine that the current surge in valuefor bitcoin and others like Ethereums ether coin isadream come true. The answer is yes and no.

Coinbase, the worlds most funded bitcoin exchange, was dragged offlineby the massive increase in interest in the space. Users have reported issues with various aspects of the service this week, and things reached a head on Thursday when the Coinbase website and mobile apps were unavailable to users for hours due to unprecedentedlevels of trading and traffic, the company said.

Bitcoin crossed the $2,000 mark for the first time this past weekend, and the charge continued this week until yesterday when, after reaching a new high of $2,805 on the Coinbase exchange, the valuationfell to$2,307. The currency has since stabilized, but its current value of $2,475.23 represents a $116.41 drop over the last 24 hours.

The market cap of digital currencies has increased ~50 percent to $91 billion in the past week. As a result, Coinbase has seen a dramatic increase in traffic and trading volume, the company told TechCrunch in a statement.

The Coinbase engineering and support teams have been working round the clock to keep up with this unprecedented volume. However, Coinbase.com has suffered a few outages, including degraded performance and deposit/withdrawal delays for some users. We are actively working on resolving these issues and restoring our site to normal performance, itadded.

Things seem more stable today, with the Coinbase website and app functioning as usual. Having said that, at the time of writing, there are some minor issues with certain debit and credit cards, according to the companys own status report.

According to Crunchbase, Coinbase has raised more than $117 million from investors that includeBank Of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ, the New York Stock Exchange, Union Square Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson andAndreessen Horowitz. Its $75 million Series C in 2015 was a record funding round for any bitcoin-focused startup.

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Messaging App Kik Rolls Out Ethereum-Based Cryptocurrency – PYMNTS.com

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Kik, the messaging app, is creating its own cryptocurrency in an effort to boost user numbers and get brands to engage more with the company.

According to a report, Canada-based Kik is rolling out Kin, a digital currency that will become the main payment method for any transactions conducted on the platform. Kin is being created as an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain and will be able to be used on other platforms. Whats more, the report noted Kik is enabling other companies to adopt its new digital currency.

In an interview, Erin Clift, chief marketing officer at Kik, said thecurrencywill help democratize how users pay for experiences, products and services. It may also make it easier for developers to create businesses outside of places like Facebook that try to keep users within its virtual walls.

I think that the end result is a better suite of experiences, Clift said in an interview. More compelling content, more choice for consumers, and whether they engage on that, inside Kik or elsewhere on this network, its still good for the ecosystem.

With Kin, users can earn currency by interacting with chatbots and other services that are on the platform created by brands, publishers and other firms. Meanwhile, the report noted companies may see Kin as a way to reward users for engaging in various tasks or activities. For instance, a brand may give Kin if a user posts about it or interacts with it. Users are able to spend their Kin via chatbot or through tipping.

The company said Kin was inspired by bitcoin, which has been growing in recent weeks, reaching a record high of $2,500 earlier in May. Kik is also creating the Kin Foundation, which will oversee the currency and circulate a set amount each day to developers. The more users use Kin, the more it will be worth, noted the report.

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Minereum, Self-Mining Smart Contract Platform Gains Traction on Cryptocurrency Market – newsBTC

Minereum, a relatively new cryptocurrency platform stands apart from its counterparts, thanks to the innovative technology which is wrapped in an easy-to-use package for wider reach.

Cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology are not limited to a closed community anymore. The endless potential of blockchain and its benefits has got many industry segments looking for ways to implement it into their operations. The increasing interest has also resulted in the creation of numerous cryptocurrency platforms that can cater to the needs of industry. But most of these solutions are very similar to each other and requires active community involvement for mining operations, which are generally processing power intensive, requiring lots of energy.

Minereum, a relatively new cryptocurrency platform stands apart from its counterparts, thanks to the innovative technology which is wrapped in an easy-to-use package for wider reach. According to the creators of Minereum, it is the first self-mining smart contract that is based on a mathematical formula which allows certain Genesis Addresses to continuously generate new tokens.

Minereum tokens (MNE) started trading recently, and in less than a month it has gained significant traction within the cryptocurrency community. Currently available for trade on Livecoin exchange platform, MNEs value is poised at $3.12 per token with a market capitalization of over $1 million. It can be traded against two major cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum (MNE/BTC and MNE/ETH).

In order to initiate the creation of new MNE tokens, Minereum recently introduced 4268 Genesis Addresses. These addresses were assigned 32,000 coins each, setting the total number of tokens on the platform to 136,576,000 MNE. The self-mining contract associated with the Minereum ensures that the Genesis Addresses create 0.00032 MNE for each Ethereum block generated. This way, it will take a good 47 years before the cryptocurrency reaches its maximum cap.

As the new cryptocurrency gains traction, the platform has announced its plans to implement a new service that allows the creation of ERC20-based tokens. The upcoming Ethereum Token Creation Service will allow people to create their own create Ethereum based tokens that can be used for organizing ICOs, trading or private use. In order to create new tokens over Minereums Ethereum Token Creation Service, users will have to just enter basic details like token name, symbol, etc., and in no time, they will have the tokens ready.

Through its services, Minereum is working on reducing the barrier to entry for individuals and businesses interested in using cryptocurrencies. Over time, startups and companies stand to gain a lot from Minereum.

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