VK, a giant social media platform in Russia, is making first steps in the field of cryptocurrencies and blockchain.

It has just launched a coin, named as VK Coin, which users can “mine” by tapping a button in a mobile application. For each tap, a user is granted 0.01 VK Coin.

The development team behind VK Coin says that users will be able to use the coin in order to obtain discounts from businesses, competing within VK’s ecosystem. In a recent move, VK enabled third-party developers to create applications that don’t have to be downloaded and can be accessed right from VK. In addition, the new payment system, VK Pay, makes it possible to transact without ever converting into fiat.

In just a couple of days, the new coin drew attention of 4 million users with some of them managing to accumulate significant amounts of tokens.

Ivan Gusev, VK Coin Project Lead, said that VK users instantly fell in love with the new coin.

“Users like the service so much, that they are slowly building the new economy around it: some users exchange the coin for real cash, others make payments for ad posts. In some communities, coins are used as an internal coin in bots and lotteries. I am getting lots of private messages with thank-you notes and cute stories, for instance, about a boy gifting to a girl a set of stickers that he bought with the coin.”


VK Coin

Importantly, the project, as of now, does not employ any blockchain solutions and the team has nothing to say about whether the coin is planned to somehow integrate blockchains in the future. The official response to requests to comments on blockchain use was that they don’t “comment on rumors”.

VK is yet another arrival into the domain of internal cryptocurrencies, leveraged by social media platforms. Among others, Facebook is said to have set up a strong development team which is said to be developing a new internal cryptocurrency that will enable easy transfer of value across the ecosystem that includes not only Facebook, but also WhatsApp and Instagram and brings together up to 3 billion people around the globe.