Kiwi introduces tipping

From today on, you can send and receive tips on Kiwi, thanks to our partnership with Dawn.

*Tipping takes just a few clicks and works with all wallets.*

This seemingly innocent feature is a big experiment, and here’s why we started it.

Why tipping matters

First of all, tipping adds more utility to the Kiwipass NFTs.

Since the very beginning, our holders have been able to submit links, curate the feed, and chat with our community. Now, they’ll be able to earn a few $ for hunting great links.

This takes us to the second point - we want to reward our curators for their great work.

So far, they could get upvotes and public praise from other users or our bots retweeting the most popular links. Now, they can also get an onchain “Superlike” in the form of a tip!

*Curators get information for which submissions they received the tip*

This raises a question - why do we want users to tip instead of us subsidizing the best posts with tokens?

Most apps that paid users for engagement were not successful.

Many crypto apps have tested the idea in the bull market, and they failed. Almost 15 years ago, in the web2 era, Jason Calacanis tested it in Mahalo. They lost to Quora, which didn’t pay people. Twitter’s paying power user for posting is interesting, but we don’t know the outcome yet.

*Mahalo story from the book "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" by Nir Eyal*

On the other hand, platforms where users can support creators thrive.

“Buy me a coffee” processes millions of dollars. Patreon, Substack & Twitch processes billions. People like to support each other, and we want to give them a way to do it. Even if it’s just a few cents, that’s more symbolic than monetary.

And we believe crypto is a great way to do it. Microtransactions have been one of the biggest challenges of the early Internet. L2s might solve this.

We don't think people will be able to live off hunting links on Kiwi anytime soon, and we won’t call it Curate2Earn. We don’t even know how it’s gonna work out. But we are excited about this collaboration!

How does it work

Dawn Pay searches for the cheapest and fastest way for you to tip a Kiwi submitter. It recommends you this route in your wallet. Most of the time, that’s sending USDC on an L2, but it also has an ETH fallback. No cumbersome searching and selecting your route manually!

You can try tipping on Kiwi News now - the feature is open to everyone. You can also track the tips metrics on our Dune dashboard maintained by rvolz.eth.

And if you want to integrate tipping into your dapp, reach out to @tomwaite on Telegram.

Our integration went smoothly - the Dawn team just asked us a few technical questions, did a PR, and then polished the feature so it feels like a natural part of our product.