The kin cryptocurrency is travel a move from its own fork of Stellar to the Solana blockchain.
To recap, the mobile app company Kik ran a $98 million initial start offering (ICO) for kin in 2017, which was made on the Ethereum blockchain. Then the company said that it would use Ethereum for custody and Stellar for transactions. Then it forked Stellar and ran its own chain. Now that’s proving to be inadequate so the cryptocurrency will port outstanding to Solana in a matter of months, pending adequate support from app developers in the Kin ecosystem.
“The fork of Stellar enabled Kin to reach millions of consumers, but we be versed it would not be a long-term solution,” a Kin Improvement Proposal shared with CoinDesk reads. “Stellar has five-second block times, so irrespective of network burden, a consumer could be seeing five-second latency on their transactions – not what we would deem a great consumer knowledge.”
Read more: Goodbye Ethereum: Kik Plans to Move Its ICO Tokens to Stellar
Solana is a high-throughput blockchain that relies on a concept mustered optimistic concurrency control, which assumes that transactions generally don’t conflict with each other. The stand out describes several other key features of its technology on Medium.
“Kin is one the best ways to show what Solana is capable of,” Anatoly Yakovenko of the Solana Origination told CoinDesk. “We expect to see other projects looking for speed and raw horsepower to migrate to Solana as well.”
The Kin Improvement Project says the move would enable an 84% reduction in latency. “Solana is measured to have approximately 60,000 goings-on per second, with 400ms block times,” it says.
The Solana Foundation would actually pay the Kin Foundation for making this ploy, however, awarding it with up to 1% of the supply of SOL (roughly $6 million at today’s prices), with 0.1% unlocking for each new 1 million full users that join over a 24-month period.
Next steps
The next step will be for Solana to take off a presentation to kin developers about the process for switching chains. If enough developers agree to make the move, Solana sceptre will largely facilitate it and the process should be complete in a matter of months.
“It is ultimately up to the developers in the Kin ecosystem to decide if they longing to migrate to Solana; however, we know that speed and throughput are two key issues within this community, and those hit on to be two areas where Solana shines brightest,” Yakovenko wrote.
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Based on the Kin Improvement Proposal, the Solana Foundation will start tracking progress on Jan. 7, 2021.
“Few projects in the blockchain place have shown an ability to grow a user base as fast as Kin has,” Gokal wrote. “We expect to see a myriad of use cases that fly to pieces out of the Kin ecosystem within the near future that perfectly exemplify Solana’s leading performance.”
Why now?
“What has happened for the last year, but mostly has been accelerated in the last six months, is the kin ecosystem has been growing like crazy,” Tanner Philp, conk of corporate development at Kik, told CoinDesk.
Kin has seen a dramatic uptick in its core metric – monthly active spenders – all through the course of the coronavirus quarantine period, Philp said.
In early March, there were approximately 1.5 million being who had spent kin in the prior 30 days. On April 20, the growth spike peaked at 4.4 million. The numbers demand trended down somewhat since then but it’s still running at about 3.5 million, a significant gain finished prior numbers.
Read more: Kin Foundation Publishes First Transparency Report Amid SEC Court Fight
Kin has been joined into 57 different applications, but usage is dominated by a few popular ones, including apps for sharing media and making eccentric, shareable shorts.
Kik, the company that still oversees kin, began investigating new blockchains to pursue eight months ago in foreboding of the need to get to something faster, Philp said.
The key use for kin is payments, and that was what Solana was always designed to accelerate.
“Solana is one of the finding outs, if not the only solution, that scales transaction times down into sub-second territory – the type of experience you’d need for any mainstream application, such as Kin,” Yakovenko wrote.
Kik believes its Stellar fork has room for several more months, but pending developments could shorten that runway.
“What we’re getting close to is rolling out the new wallet for kin that Kik Inc. is be employed on, to connect the ecosystem, and that’s where you’ll start to see some more vibrancy within the ecosystem,” Philp said.
New promotes
The wallet will make it simple to move kin earned in one app over to others. The company isn’t committing to a timeline but that pocketbook could appear in late Q3, Philp said.
When that happens, if users start moving tokens roughly between apps, it will become important to add metadata to transactions showing which application drove the spend. That information helps apps get properly credited by the Kin Rewards Engine. Stellar does not support a large enough amount of materials to make its metadata features useful.
Read more: Blockchain Gaming, Messaging Apps See User Growth Centre of Coronavirus Lockdowns
Kin was founded out of the company that formerly ran the Kik mobile app. The vision for the cryptocurrency was to create a way for people using facile and web-based products to have a marketplace of value, but one where that value could be very tiny, for trade in matters like digital stickers and access to small games.
Companies are rewarded for building out the kin ecosystem with daily emissions from the Kin It worth someones whiles Engine, which shares out its vast trove of undistributed kin to developers who are driving transactions.
“Kin started out with getting a lot of owners using it across a lot of different apps,” Philp said. “Now it’s about getting people to spend larger amounts. It started as fractions of pennies, now woman are spending pennies, and we expect that to continue to grow.”
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