Kik Partners IMVU, the World’s Largest Avatar-Based Social Network
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This week Kik announces a new partnership with , the world’s largest avatar-based social network.
Kik is a messenger service which has over 15 million monthly users including 1 in 5 US teenagers, and the project’s Kin cryptocurrency is designed to enable users to earn Kin through platform engagement and then spend it on related services. The partnership will connect IMVU to other services using Kin, and allow IMVU users to earn on their platform where an average user spends almost an hour a day customizing avatars and interacting with other users.
The network will enable users to earn Kin tokens on platforms like Kik and IMVU which can then be spent on services offered by other partners like Blackhawk Network, a major e-giftcard vendor giving users access to services like Netflix and Xbox Live, and Unity, the cross-platform game engine behind Kerbal Space Program and other popular games.
Kik first discovered the potential to enable their users to purchase goods and services through currency earned by engaging with the platform with the launch of Kik points. The points system allowed users to choose to watch ads in exchange for points which could be exchanged for digital goods like Stickers on the platform.
Like the IMVU Credits system, a points system allowing users to earn money by creating and selling digital goods on IMVU, Kik points operated in a closed ecosystem that didn’t interact with other platforms or services. The success of the project demonstrated the potential of using a credits system within the platform – Kik Director of Partner Success Sergio Silva discussed the transition from Kik points to Kin with CCN:
“The vision was how do we create a world that’s fairer, and how do we create a way where everyone is fairly compensated for their contributions in a decentralized way, in a decentralized ecosystem.”
The idea is to enable users to spend and earn across different platforms, which led to the launch of Kin tokens, which last year. While IMVU allows users to exchange IMVU Credits for fiat currency within the IMVU marketplace, the new partnership aims to open that closed ecosystem to a wider marketplace by connecting IMVU users to other apps and services connected to Kin. “One of the things that we look at from the partnership is how does IMVU complement Kin’s ecosystem in a meaningful way, and how does that partnership accelerate the usage of Kin and the transaction volume of Kin. First, IMVU has a very strong content creator userbase. We’ve got 50,000 people on IMVU earning a living creating digital products,” the Kik executive said, adding:
“This gives us the opportunity to unlock that earning potential and create a network effect across digital services.”
Half of IMVU users transact on the IMVU platform every month, and over half of them already use Kik, a connection that the teams feel will create a seamless transition into Kin adoption. While an estimated , over 70% of IMVU users are female which may also enable Kin to reach an untapped demographic of female content creators and community members.
How it works
IMVU users will activate wallets, allowing them to earn Kin tokens by participating in polls and other services and then spend the Kin on virtual goods in IMVU or e-gift card offers and other services.
“We really look to our Creators’ success as a mark of the platform’s success,” says Victor Zaud, senior vice president of marketing at IMVU. “Our Creators are incredibly creative, so we try hard to focus on empowering them further through content programs that reward their content creation.”
The Kik team believe that bringing a meaningful use case for cryptocurrency allowing users to earn and spend crypto on the products they enjoy will help accelerate the mass adoption of cryptocurrency as a whole.
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Today marks the official release of , the fifteenth generation of bitcoin’s original software client launched by Satoshi Nakamoto almost nine years ago. Overseen by lead maintainer Wladimir van der Laan, this latest major release was developed by nearly 100 contributors over a six-month period, with major contributions through, and.
bitcoin Core 0.15.0 offers significant performance and usability improvements over previous versions of the software implementation. It also introduces several new features to better deal with the current status of the network.
These are some of the more notable changes.
Chainstate Database Restructure
One of the biggest changes compared to previous versions of the software involves how the state of bitcoin’s blockchain is stored. This “chainstate” or “UTXO-set” is saved in a dedicated database, whereas previously it had been categorized per transaction. If one transaction sent bitcoins to several outputs (“addresses”), these different outputs were stored as a single database entry, referring to that one transaction.
With bitcoin Core 0.15.0, these outputs are instead stored in a single database entry each. If a single transaction sends bitcoins to different outputs, every output is stored separately. While this method does claim more disc space, it requires less computational resources if one of these outputs is spent later on.
The most concrete benefit of this new data structure is that initial sync-time for new nodes is decreased by about 40 percent. It also introduces simpler code, reduces memory usage and more. Additionally, it fixes a bug that could theoretically crash bitcoin Core nodes, controversially revealed at last weekend’s Breaking bitcoin conference in Paris.
Improved Fee Estimation
As bitcoin blocks have been filling up over the last year or two, not all transactions fit in the first block that is mined. Instead, miners typically prioritize the transactions that include the most fees. If a user wants to have his transaction confirmed quickly, he should include a high enough fee. If he’s not in a rush, a lower fee should suffice.
However, the bitcoin network deals with inherent unpredictability in terms of the speed at which blocks are found or the number of transactions that is being transmitted at any time. This makes it hard to include the right transaction fee.
bitcoin Core 0.15.0 lowers this fee uncertainty: The newest version of the software includes significantly better fee estimation algorithms. This is mostly because the software takes more data into account when making the estimations, such as the fees included in older confirmed transactions, as well as fees in unconfirmed transactions — the fees that proved insufficient.
Additionally, users can enjoy more flexibility. For one, bitcoin Core 0.15.0 for the first time allows users to include fees that could take their transactions up to a week to confirm. And, also newly introduced, users can choose to accept more or less risk that their transaction could be delayed due to a sudden influx of transactions.
Replace-by-fee in User Interface
Even with improved fee estimation, it is possible that users will still need to wait longer than they want for their transactions to confirm, perhaps because there is a sudden rush of transactions on the network, or maybe because a user changed his mind and prefers to have a transaction confirm faster than originally paid for, or for other reasons.
For these cases, some wallets let users add a “replace-by-fee” tag to their transactions. With such a tag, nodes and miners on the network know that the sender may want to replace that transaction with a newer transaction that includes a higher fee. This effectively allows users to bump the transaction in line to have it confirmed faster.
bitcoin Core nodes have supported replace-by-fee for well over a year now: They already replace “replace-by-fee” tagged transactions if the new transaction includes more fees. But it was never easy to utilize for bitcoin Core wallet users themselves.
Until now.
The bitcoin Core 0.15.0 wallet introduces a replace-by-fee toggle in its user interface. This lets users include the appropriate tag, allowing them to easily increase the fees on their transactions later on.
Multi-wallet Support (Client and RPC Only)
bitcoin Core 0.15.0 lets users create several wallets for the first time. These wallets all have their own separate bitcoin addresses, private keys and, therefore, funds. Users can utilize the different wallets for different purposes; for example, one wallet can be used for personal day-to-day purchases, another for business-related transactions, and a third just for trading.
Using several wallets can offer a number of benefits. For instance, it makes accounting easier and more convenient. Additionally, users can more easily benefit from increased privacy as the different wallets cannot be linked to each other by blockchain analysis. It’s also possible to use different wallets for specific applications and more.
For now, multi-wallet support is not yet available for regular wallet users; only advanced users who operate from the command line or through connected applications can utilize the feature.
Other Improvements
Apart from the above mentioned notable changes, bitcoin Core 0.15.0 includes a number of additional performance improvements, as most new major bitcoin Core releases do. Concretely, these changes speed up how quickly blocks are downloaded from the network, they let nodes start up faster, and up-to-date nodes will be able to validate new blocks more quickly, in turn benefiting network-propagation time.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that bitcoin Core 0.15.0 will disconnect from BTC1 peers on the network. This means that the bitcoin network will experience less disruption if the SegWit2x hard fork splits the network, as both types of nodes will more easily find compatible peers. While this change has gotten some media attention, this change shouldn’t really be noticeable.
Thanks to Chaincode Labs developer John Newbery for feedback and suggestions. For more details on what’s new in bitcoin Core 0.15.0, see the , or watch bitcoin Core contributor Gregory Maxwell’s “deep dive” at the San Francisco bitcoin developers meetup.
