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After successfully raising $4 million to fund the SEC’s $100 million legal lawsuit, Kik seems to get more supports from the crypto community.
Kik CFO, Tanner Philp can be seen of posting a series of tweets on his account expressing his point of view on the ongoing legal battle.
He started by commenting CNBC’s crypto trader, Ran Neuner’s post on what’s happening in crypto space during the week, which then continued by a comment debunking SEC’s complaint that pictures Kik as a failing business.
“In reality, Kik, like every other messenger (FBM, WA, Telegram, Snapchat) was indeed not profitable yet continued to find a way to innovate when most others have died or been acquired and repurposed,” Philp tweeted.
He, then, highlighted Kik’s multiple achievements, such as being one of the most engaging apps, compared to Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat, the first chat to go viral, become a platform and launch bot platform, even before Facebook, Telegram and Google, also as the app that inspired WeChat.
2/ While the SEC’s complaint paints a picture of a “failing” business, in reality, Kik, like every other messenger (FBM, WA, Telegram, Snapchat) was indeed not profitable yet continued to find a way to innovate when most others have died or been acquired and repurposed.
— Tanner Philp (@tannerphilp) June 8, 2019
6/ First chat app to go viral (0-1MM users in 15 days; 1MM-2MM in 7 days) https://t.co/y5HWqmxhhR
— Tanner Philp (@tannerphilp) June 8, 2019
7/ First chat app to become a platform https://t.co/Hl3IeQQrnn
— Tanner Philp (@tannerphilp) June 8, 2019
8/ First chat app in the western world to launch a bot platform (soon followed by FB, telegram, google) https://t.co/NV23lhQWfR
— Tanner Philp (@tannerphilp) June 8, 2019
9/ Over the last decade, Kik has been first on a lot of things and has inspired some of the biggest innovations in tech. WeChat, which now powers >$10 trillion of commerce annually, was inspired by Kik in 2010 (years later Tencent invested $50MM in Kik at a $1 billion valuation) pic.twitter.com/dqaJElCC0c
— Tanner Philp (@tannerphilp) June 8, 2019
The tweet storm continues as Philp reminisced to the time he joined the company the first time, which he said that Kin was “already in development”, although it was called “Kik Points” at the time.
12/ I worked on Kik Points from the day it launched. It was an experiment to see if we could launch an economy in the digital world, but the vision was always bigger. Kik points was a proof-of-concept for what ultimately became Kin. I wrote about that here https://t.co/t6M1NdiB5h
— Tanner Philp (@tannerphilp) June 8, 2019
He brought it up as he tried to ditch the SEC’s claim that Kin was “a flippant, last-ditch effort to catch a rising trend in crypto” while in reality, “it was 6 years in the making (8 if you count from today)”.
10/ There was a quote in the SEC’s complaint that Kin was a “Hail Mary”, and the insinuation made was that this was a flippant, last-ditch effort to catch a rising trend in crypto. When in reality it was 6 years in the making (8 if you count from today).
— Tanner Philp (@tannerphilp) June 8, 2019
He admitted that before 2016, Kin was a Hail Mary. However, the company then decided to pull it out, and instead in 2017, launched it for “every other developer that was struggling to find a sustainable business model”, not just for Kik.
Philp debunked the SEC’s claim that the current Kin is a Hail Mary through the statements.
13/ A Hail Mary is a designed play. It’s a big play designed to win the game. That’s what Kin was. We saw the increasing monopolization of big tech and more developers struggling to find a sustainable business model, so we pulled out our big play we had been working on for 6+ yrs
— Tanner Philp (@tannerphilp) June 8, 2019
14/ So in 2017 we launched Kin. Not just for Kik, for every other developer that was struggling to find a sustainable business model.
— Tanner Philp (@tannerphilp) June 8, 2019
“And it’s working,” he tweeted as he presented the stats of Kin.
16/ And it’s working. 2MM people have earned Kin and over 450k people have spent Kin across 44 different independent apps in the last month (5.5MM+ and 1MM+ all time). Kin is money for the digital world. https://t.co/Luowi1aREP
— Tanner Philp (@tannerphilp) June 8, 2019
He closed his tweet storm by saying, that Kik will proceed with the legal lawsuit, “because in order for this industry to move forward someone needs to go first, and we are no strangers to being first”.
17/ So just like Kin was launched not just for Kik, but for every other developer that needed a sustainable path forward, we will take this fight on for everyone. Because in order for this industry to move forward someone needs to go first, and we are no strangers to being first.
— Tanner Philp (@tannerphilp) June 8, 2019
The tweets have brought more sympathy for Kik as seen on Reddit where it received lots of supportive comments.
“Get that man on the stand!!! Let him tell them what's what,” said a Redditor. Others said, “I think Tanner did a great job helping to put things in perspective for those that have been mislead. His tweets don’t paint the full picture but it’s a really good start” and “Good read wish other people could see it other than reddit and his twit followers.”
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As always, stick with Chepicap to find out how the case will develop.