Kin proposes to move from its fork of Stellar over to Solana

The Kin engineering team has submitted a proposal to migrate Kin from its current Stellar-based chain over to Solana. Kik Iterative Inc., the creators of the Kin cryptoasset, said that Stellar’s five-second block times and limited metadata space within transactions were unsuitable for Kin’s user experience standards. It, therefore, began looking at alternative protocols in Q2 of last year before recently landing on Solana.

According to the Kin team, Solana offers a substantial improvement in performance (reported 400 ms block times on a local test node). It also provides enough room within on-chain transactions for Kin to add data related to the Kin Rewards Engine (KRE). Otherwise, the project would have to resort to off-chain storage measures.

Kin developers would need to approve the proposal before any migration could occur. But CoinDesk reports the Solana staff would facilitate the transition, a process that “should be complete in a matter of months.” The switch also comes with a financial incentive for the Kin Foundation. If approved, the Solana Foundation would grant Kin 1% of the total supply of SOL, with 0.1% unlocking for every new one million “monthly active spenders” of KIN over 24 months (starting Jan. 2021).

Why it matters:

• Why make a move? The Kin Foundation says that its on-chain activity is accelerating. It self-reported that users spending KIN jumped from 1.5 million in March to 4.4 million in mid-April, hence the need to move to a more performant network. While it’s easy to inflate activity metrics, an analysis by CoinMetrics last year determined Kin does have a “relatively high number of on-chain transactions.” However, the value transferred across the network is lower than other blockchains, indicating Kin is primarily used for micro-transactions.
• What does this say about Solana? While it is yet another green smart contract platform that offers a scalable alternative to existing platforms, it has a novel consensus mechanism in Proof of History, which aims to eliminate the time-intensive process of transaction ordering. But Solana still new, and its performance could degrade to an extent as more validators join the network. There’s also the argument that blockchains don’t have the user base to require highly scalable platforms. Focusing on maximizing transactions per second (TPS) might be putting the cart before the horse. The news is still a boost to Solana, which has announced several new partnerships as of late including one with stablecoin project Terra.

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