Kin Migration Midcourse Update
Close to 5 Million Wallets already migrated
As previously announced, the Kin migration to the Solana Blockchain kicked off on December 15, 2020. We believe this was the beginning of the largest migration in the history of crypto, based on the number of wallets, and it ushered a new era of capacity and performance for Kin.
Since the migration kicked off, 4.8 million accounts have been migrated to the Solana blockchain. This included all Kin accounts that became active after the migration as well as all accounts with a balance of $1.00 USD or greater, representing over 99% of the circulating supply from the Kin blockchain. As outlined in the kick-off post, the rest of the accounts are expected to be migrated over time, using what we call offline migration, which is a process by which inactive accounts are switched over to the Solana blockchain systematically.
However, so far, the whole process has not been without challenges. The scale of the Kin ecosystem has caused a temporary degradation of performance on the Solana network due to the time it takes to query the blockchain for account information. This has also caused a delay in the approval process for the new Ledger app. Several exchanges rely on Ledger, so this has caused them to temporarily pause KIN deposits and withdrawals.
We have been working with the Solana team to address these issues and leverage the learnings to optimize the network even further, and the ecosystem has also been responsive to their requests. We are already seeing steady improvement in performance and stability. We expect this to continue and for the Solana blockchain to return to the level of performance we saw prior to the migration. This will unlock the availability of the Ledger app which will enable exchanges to come back online.
As these performance improvements are made, the migration is continuing to move forward. Any account that is part of a transaction is automatically migrated through the on-demand migration process, and any inactive accounts who return to activity will also be migrated right away, while the rest of the inactive accounts will continue to be gradually migrated later.
Concurrently, we have been engaging and assisting other third parties to ensure that apps, wallets, exchanges, and other services are properly updated and able to resume regular activity as soon as possible.
There continues to be good momentum across the Kin ecosystem and we are excited about leaning into that with the scale and performance that the Kin infrastructure will offer as the Solana blockchain stabilizes.
