The CEO of Canadian-based messaging startup Kik Ted Livingston today disclosed that they spent about $5 million on negotiations. Kik’s app is quite popular and bears a wide range of similarities with Viber and WhatsApp . However, it bears some additional functions that make it much more advanced. This official says that Kik has been into talks with the United States Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).
Details about the negotiations
In January, the SEC spoke out outlining that the Canadian-based messaging startup had for about two years violated its guidelines. The body says that the violation was in line with Kik’s “Token Distribution Event” stressing that the corporate made $97 million throughout its sales.
On November 2018, SEC threatened with an enforcement motion and at later on it would serve the corporate with a “Wells Notice”. Kik was required to file a response within a 30-day timeframe.
Kik criticizes the regulator
Livingston says that the amount spent on negotiations with the regulator were quite high. They have had to move back and forth to Washington for the past 18 months. On January, the agency decided to send out a warning to The SEC outlining that it would retaliate. It would be pushing an enforcement motion that will be in opposition to that of the SEC. Kik promotes its advertisements, but says they are not a guarantee to money making and thus the regulators needs to be reasonable.
It was in the previous week that the chief of the workplace of capital markets developments on the SEC Amy Starr cracked up. The official said that the regulator was open to working closely with the native crypto and blockchain-related companies. He moved ahead to defend they body outlining that the U.S. securities legal guidelines were supposed to be dynamic.
The corporate has lately been making a lot of changes, one of them being the move into making payments. An official working with it says that the Kik messenger will cater for payments through Kin which happens to be its own cryptocurrency. It will be developed on an Ethereum blockchain.
