Why $kiwimas?
Last week, a Kiwi News community member spontaneously launched a Kiwi and Christmas themed memecoin called $kiwimas on wow.xyz, Zora’s token launcher. It was in response to dressing the Kiwi mascot with a santa hat. Channeling my inner degen, I immediately bought a large percentage of the coin, roughly 40% of the supply with 1 ETH. And since I wanted all my co-conspirators to have equity in the token, I then distributed it.
First we downloaded all the addresses of Kiwi Pass holders from holders.at and airdropped them 10% of my supply.
I then sent 50% of my supply to my co-founder Mac, who has been building Kiwi News with me from the first day.
It then took us a few days to clean up our spreadsheets, until we airdropped another 10% of our supply to all those who we have paid for contributing to Kiwi News. For all our income, we’ve been putting 10% of it aside to pay to contributors.
Finally, we downloaded the list of top 100 Kiwi Karma earners and airdropped them another 10% of our supply.
The funny thing is that despite me having given away more than half of my supply now, I still seem to be up by 100% in ETH-terms.
How did we do this?
For years now we’ve been building systems within Kiwi News that track contributions to the project. We were basically the first project to introduce a points system. We never intended to use it to airdrop to our contributors, but given that Reddit and Hacker News have Karma scores, we thought them to be fundamental to our products. Never the less, this karma system has now, with fairly high accuracy, tracked those users who have been the most essential to delivering news.
Internally, since we’re a true onchain organization, we’ve been tracking contributions to the project since the beginning. For all our income we put 10% aside to pay those contributors who were most eager over a given period. We’ve been doing this basically from the beginning. To also track who should get how much retro funding, of which we’re also allocating 10% to contributors, we’ve been tracking everyone’s contributions to the project, and so everyone respectively gets a share of retro funding.
Now, you’ll have a hard time finding any of this documented online. It isn’t. This is an internal culture that doesn’t belong on the dark forest. Nevertheless, I felt a need to share parts of its inner working here as it contextualizes what we’re doing with $kiwimas.
Working backwards from a million
I didn’t put much thought into $kiwimas in the first days after its launch. But while reflecting in bed, on a night before we had airdropped our contributors and top karma earners, it dawned on me that if the token would take off now, we’d be in a bit of a mess.
I had a very strong feeling that it wouldn’t be fair if some early memecoinsters would enjoy the upside of a Kiwi-themed memecoin while most of our community was left out. And so this to me formed the basis of a plan, which was to use the already-prepared attribution systems to airdrop as much of our cheaply bought supply to those who have helped us build the system over the years. I used to hold 45% of all $kiwimas supply. It’s now only 16.6%. I now feel good about the memecoin, here’s why:
I thought to myself that if this thing ever reached a million, how would I feel about it? And it had then dawned on me that if some of our most active contributors hadn’t received or bought an allocation, then this posed potentially a threat to the health of the community. So by airdropping my supply to everyone involved, this to me was like a preparation in the event that the coin really takes off. Having carefully tracked contributors over years now and by making it fairly clear what is intended behavior within the project, if the coin now goes up I think I’ll feel good about it because we’ve done our best at including everyone who was helpful along the way.
What now?
$kiwimas is obviously a memecoin wif seasonality and its purpose is to have volatility. I hope it will have that. That said, it is a seasonal thing and we have no plans to integrate it into the Kiwi News project. It’s a memecoins. To me, the vision is that this is a reward event for everyone who has been loyal or helpful to creating and fostering this community. I also think this can act like a widely reaching onchain ad for our brand and product. I hope it will be! You can, of course, buy $kiwimas to gamble on it going higher. But if you’ve derived some value from Kiwi News over the last two years, and you feel like giving back to those who have contributed to the project, then I think that this is also a really great reason to buy some tokens!