Kindred is kinda amazing. It’s basically AirBnB, but with credits instead of money. Because you’re trading for credits, the homes are also people who travel (taking us back towards airbnb in the early days), and so they’re real people homes.
This has a few benefits:
- you’re encouraged to see this as you’re staying in someone elses home, at least for me, this made us extra thoughtful and considerate around the space
- You’re encouraged to treat it as a community and to take care of the space, for example water the plants, or look after a cat that’s there.
- There’s no tax on what you earn, as it’s not “money”
- This is huge. For a lot of people listing a place on airbnb and then getting taxed 40% to spend it on airbnbs is crazy
- Kindred opens up sharing your home and using that to travel the world, a truly amazing trade.
- All homes are 1 credit per day, simple
Note that whilst you don’t pay for nights with money, you do pay for cleaning and Kindred’s chunky service fee with credits. So it makes more value for longer stays.
So we just said that credits are not money. Right? RIGHT? Well let’s take a look at that… They are:
- A medium of exchange
- Fungible, 1 credit is interchangeable with another
- Made up by humans
- And so on. It’s just you can’t use them to buy tacos.
That means that:
- Kindred is the central banker and creator of credits.
- …
So of course, there’s an inflation problem. Inflation is where the value of money or a token decreases over time. It happens… well for a lot of reasons… Let’s see them evolve here:
- Kindred creates 7 credits every time someone signs up to the platform, 5 for the new person, 2 for the existing
- There’s some creation of credits for availability (now scrapped I think, due to gaming), that also increased the credit supply.
- Credits are only transferred by staying in another home, from person 1 to person 2.
- There is no way to destroy credits, e.g. to cash them out to money; to bid >1 credit per night (though apparently that’s been seen in testing); or that they time out after some time.
- Functionally this means that the average balance of kindred credits is 7 per person.
- But hosting is the barrier, so I’m sure many people:
- Sign up to get their 5 credits.
- Travel and never host, becoming ghosts.
- Every ghost is an inflationary effect of +7 credits into the rest of they system (assuming they use the full 5 free days for simplicity).
- So we can imagine for different proportions of ghosts, our average kindred balance for non ghosts changes:
- 0% ghosts - average balance 7
- 50% ghosts - average balance 10.5 (my balance is 11 as I type this from a kindred home)
- 25% ghossts - 9.3
- 12.5% ghosts - 7.875
This all makes sense, you want to get people using the platform, and the simple way to get people to join your network is to give them free stuff. The problem is, this has an inflationary effect. When I have some credits in my account, why would I bother to rent out my home. The only reason is if I want someone to care for my plants, and some guests are good at that, others are meh, and treat it like a hotel :( .
But as we just saw, by default I have credits in my account. So I don’t need to list until they run out.
5 nights for signing up works as a baseline amount that keeps some float in the average account. This enables booking a week away, and then listing your place yourself. But from usage it feels like, you don’t need to list as much as you stay, especially if you get some referrals. Which means that:
- There’s a scarcity of supply on Kindred. Great listings go fast!
- Which implicitly means that 1 credit is worth a bit less than 1 night, there’s been inflation, it just isn’t reflected in the nominal value.
- This might be why Kindred are testing out some ways to claim back credits, such as late check out fees paid in credits.