Kik to shut down its core messaging service

In a company blog post, Livingston said the ongoing dispute with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has forced Kik to close its doors. In addition to shutting down the app, the company plans to diminish its crypto operations to just 19 core developers to ‘ensure that KIN can scale to become the true currency of the internet going forward’.

At the moment, Kik is in a dispute with the SEC over the 2017 initial coin offering of its KIN token. The ICO raised USD 100 million, which the SEC claims was an unregistered security offering. Since the SEC allegations in June 2019, Kin’s token has dropped from USD 0.000036 to USD 0.0000105 as of today, CoinDesk cited data provider Messari.

While the Kik app is shutting down, Livingston said the core developer team is pivoting toward developing the KIN token.