The KIN ICO was one of the biggest, but also most troublesome projects. After failing to collect the target $100 million, but still receiving $70 million’s worth of Ethereum from around 10,000 investors, the KIN project tanked. But now, a plan is in the works to still integrate the KIN digital asset as a means of payment for the Kik chat app.
https://twitter.com/kin_foundation/status/993853913068720133
It seems the problem was that the Kik app was quite far from the crypto community. The KIN foundation did not push aggressively to get the asset adopted on exchanges, hence KIN tokens lost value and saw negligible volumes on a few decentralized exchanges. The asset also saw no marketing or promotion.
The drop in KIN prices continues, as the asset lost more than 27% in the past week, to $0.000170.
!KIN!
But now, the digital asset may be revived, and ICO buyers may be handed a totally different token, this time based on a forked Stellar network especially built for the Kik app.
Two-Asset System: Ethereum and Stellar
The intention was for KIN to be an in-app coin. However, the requirements of the Ethereum network to own ETH and pay gas fees may have made integration more difficult. Moving all wallets to Stellar would also require that users have wallets with Lumens, a move that may be too expensive for the KIN project, and too complicated for investors.
Hence, the Stellar team decided to create a special network for the KIN digital asset. However, the Ethereum-based ERC-20 token would continue to exist, as the Foundation stated, for liquidity purposes. At the same time, the Kik chat app would use an entirely different system, with still unknown parameters, for speed and scalability.
The Stellar transfer system would also be used to move between the Ethereum based token, and the in-app token.
At the moment, there is no more clarity on the security and governance of the proposed system, and there is a possibility that it contains a dose of centralization. Stellar itself relies on semi-centralized verification in order to achieve the high transaction rate. Much like Ripple (XRP), Stellar uses a separate system for payments and remittances.
The move by KIN is important for crypto popularization, but also underlines the fact that blockchains and on-chain transactions are too slow for mainstream use in apps.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
