The Kik messaging app, especially popular in the United States, has announced it will publish its Kin token on both the Ethereum and Stellar blockchains. The project was originally planned for the Ethereum network. In December of last year, however, Kik criticized Ethereum for its lack of scalability and announced a move to Stellar.
According to a post on Kik’s Medium blog, the company has since changed course. The project will now be implemented on two blockchains: Ethereum will provide liquidity for the token, while Stellar will handle transactions. Practically, the app will be launched on an Ethereum basis, but the actual transactions will be executed on Stellar.
The transfer between the two blockchains will be achieved using atomic swaps, which enable tokens to be exchanged across different blockchains. Kik will create 10 trillion Kin tokens in ERC-20 format and an equal number—10 trillion—of Kin tokens on Stellar. A token cannot exist simultaneously on both chains: when an ERC-20 token leaves the Kik app, the corresponding Stellar token will be locked, and vice versa.
This hybrid approach to the Kin token is surprising because the company had previously considered moving the token entirely from Ethereum to Stellar amid high transaction fees and slow confirmation times on Ethereum. One likely reason for using Stellar for transactions is Stellar’s announcement to implement Lightning-like capabilities by the end of the year, improving transaction speed and cost. According to Coindesk, Kik could still move Kin back exclusively to Ethereum if Ethereum’s protocol develops a reliable scaling solution.
The Kin token is intended for use within the Kik messaging app to purchase digital goods and, in the future, physical goods as well. Kik plans to roll out the implementation in two phases, scheduled for the second and third quarters of 2018.
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