Kin prepares to move from Stellar to Solana

The kin cryptocurrency is considering a move from Stellar to the Solana blockchain. At launch, in 2017, the company said it would use Ethereum for security and Stellar for transactions.

"The Stellar fork allowed Kin to reach millions of consumers, but we knew it would not be a long-term solution," reads a Kin improvement proposal. "Stellar has five-second block times, so regardless of the network load, a consumer could see five-second latency in their transactions, and that's not what we consider a great consumer experience."

The reasons for the change

Solana is a high-performance blockchain that builds on a concept known as "optimistic competition control", which assumes that transactions generally do not conflict with each other.

The Solana Foundation would pay the Kin Foundation to carry out the agreement, assigning up to 1% of the supply of SOL (about $ 6 million at today's prices), with 0,1% release for each new million Investors active that joins for a period of 24 months.

Next steps

The next step for Solana will be to introduce kin developers to the process of moving from one chain to another. If enough developers accept the plan, Solana staff will make it as smooth as possible and the process should be completed in a matter of months.

“In the end, it's up to the developers of the Kin ecosystem to decide whether they want to migrate to Solana; however, we know that speed and productivity are two key issues within this community, and they are also two areas in which Solana shines particularly, ”wrote Yakovenko.

What time?

"What has happened in the past year, but has mostly accelerated in the past six months, is that the kin ecosystem has grown like a madman," said Tanner Philp, head of corporate development at Kik. The Kik company began investigating new blockchains to be pursued eight months ago in anticipation of the need to find something faster, Philp said.

A key point for kin is the speed of payments, and that's also what Solana was designed for. "What we are approaching is the launch of the new kin wallet that Kik Inc. is working on," said Philp.

New features

The new wallet makes it easy to move kin earned in one app to another. If users start moving tokens between apps, it will be important to add metadata to transactions that show which application drove the spend.

This data allows apps to be properly accredited by the Kin Rewards Engine. Stellar does not support enough data to implement its metadata functionality. "Kin started by making sure that many users could use it on many different apps," said Philp. “Now it's about convincing people to spend more money. It started as a fraction of cents, now people are spending cents and we expect this to continue to grow. "