A Chain of Its Own: Mobile App Kik to Fork Stellar for Fee-Free Blockchain

Kik's crypto token, kin, currently exists as an ethereum-based ERC-20 token, yet CoinDesk recently reported that'd the company would be moving to a two-chain system whereby its tokens were supported on both the ethereum blockchain and the stellar blockchain.

The Kin Foundation, the non-profit organization managing the development of kin, has announced another move, deciding instead to fork stellar to create its own blockchain.

For its kin token, the problem with stellar is that it costs a tiny amount to make a transaction on that blockchain, and that has to be paid in lumens, stellar's native cryptocurrency.

To encourage entrepreneurs to create these services on the Kik app, the Kin Foundation has a giant pool of kin in reserve that it will use to automatically pay entrepreneurs for fostering economic activity, called the Kin Rewards Engine.

The KRE will pay out a share of kin every day, rewarding each app based on how much economic activity it generated that day.

According to the announcement Tuesday, all that activity will now take place on kin's blockchain.

In short, every kin token will exist on two ledgers: one on the ethereum blockchain and one on the kin blockchain.

"When you look at the Stellar network and compare it with Kin's fork of Stellar, the two networks are identical, with one exception: the people running the federation nodes," Livingston said.

Livingston believes future kin nodes will be run by the large services driving the kin economy, the ones that earn a lot of income through the KRE, so have a strong interest in seeing the value of kin grow steadily and as such, will volunteer as nodes.

"The question is less about the terrible stuff of the world. That's stuff we're all going to have to grapple with as a global society," he said, adding, "The question is more about centralized powerCould Kin become a centralized authority in the kin ecosystem? And we want the answer to that to be no."