Scaling Kin: A Proposal to Migrate to Solana
Kik Engineering Makes the Case for Upgrading the Kin Blockchain to Solana
Today Kin is used by millions of consumers across more than 50 independent apps. From what we have seen, that makes Kin the most used cryptocurrency by mainstream consumers. Getting to this level of scale has required constant iteration. Kin was first launched on Ethereum but quickly capped out at thousands of consumers, with long transaction times and high transaction fees. After building Kik Messenger for 10+ years we at Kik understood that for crypto to break into the mainstream, millions of people need to be able to transact near instantly with zero fees. This is what consumers expect in great consumer products, and crypto should be no different. So in Q1 2018, on behalf of the Kin Foundation, we started working with the Stellar protocol as a potential alternative to Ethereum. After working through a number of iterations with the Stellar testnet, we proposed a custom fork of Stellar that was ultimately adopted by the Kin Ecosystem. This unlocked the ability for the ecosystem to introduce better consumer experiences at scale. Since then, the Kin Ecosystem has grown from 100k monthly active spenders to over 3MM.
The fork of Stellar enabled Kin to reach millions of consumers, but we knew there were limitations. Stellar has five second block times, so irrespective of network load, a consumer could be seeing five second latency on their transactions — not what we would deem a great consumer experience. We also knew that at some point the Kin Ecosystem would overtake the bandwidth of Stellar, so in Q2 of 2019 we at Kik Interactive Inc. started looking at other potential options for Kin.
Over the last year, we’ve been evaluating different options including existing blockchains, layer 2 solutions, and new blockchains coming to market. After working through all the options, we believe that Solana is the best fit for Kin and are making a formal proposal to developers with an active app in the Kin Ecosystem to migrate from the Kin Blockchain to the Solana Blockchain.
The proposal has four parts:
- Challenges With Stellar
- Opportunity With Solana
- Aligning Incentives With Solana
- Recommended Next Steps
Review the proposal and join the discussion at the link: https://github.com/kikengineering/technology/blob/patch-1/improvement-proposals/solana-migration.md
