Kik shuts down messaging app as it battles the SEC over initial coin offering 1

Kik Interactive CEO Ted Livingston announced that the company is shutting down Kik Messenger to focus on its cryptocurrency Kin, the target of a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company’s team will be reduced to 19 people, a reduction that will affect more than 100 employees, as it focuses on converting more Kin users into buyers.

Ted Livingston

Kik Interactive CEO Ted Livingston announced that the company is shutting down Kik Messenger to focus on its cryptocurrency Kin, the target of a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company’s team will be reduced to 19 people, a reduction that will affect more than 100 employees, as it focuses on converting more Kin users into buyers.

Livingston wrote in a medium blog post, adding that the changes will reduce the company’s burn rate by 85%, enabling it to get through the SEC trial.

After 18 months of working with the SEC the only choice they gave us was to either label Kin a security or fight them in court. Becoming a security would kill the usability of any cryptocurrency and set a dangerous precedent for the industry. So with the SEC working to characterize almost all cryptocurrencies as securities we made the decision to step forward and fight.

While we are ready to take on the SEC in court, we underestimated the tactics they would employ. How they would take our quotes out of context to manipulate the public to view us as bad actors. How they would pressure exchanges not to list Kin. And how they would draw out a long and expensive process to drain our resources.

Instead of selling some of our Kin into the limited liquidity that exists today, we made the decision to focus our current resources on the few things that matter most.

We are all in. And despite these hard decisions my confidence in Kin only continues to grow. Together we will show the power of the Kin Ecosystem. Together we will get millions of people to buy Kin to use it. And together we will build a new economy that offers equal opportunity to billions of people. Together we will win.

To get more people who buy Kin to use the currency, Livingston said the company will focus on three things: enabling the Kin blockchain to support a billion consumers making a dozen transactions a day, with confirmation times of less than a second; increasing adoption and growth for developers who use Kin in their apps; and building a mobile wallet that makes it easier to buy and use Kin.