How Could Solana Blockchain Help the KIN Project?

As we found in a previous post, Why Ethereum Project’s That Need to Scale Are Choosing the Solana Blockchain, there is significant demand for fast-growing blockchain projects to build upon a highly scalable high-TPS blockchain.

In fact, in Solana’s latest partnership announcement, the CTO of dfuse chose Solana for their network performance and their scalability that is aligned to network and hardware industry trends.

“We have decided to collaborate with Solana because of its unique approach at solving many of the challenges encountered in the blockchain space, enabling the protocol to support 50K+ transactions per second at the first layer,” said Alexandre Bourget, co-founder and CTO at dfuse. “By pushing the limits of networks and hardware, they will be a driving force in making our products even more powerful and performant.”

CTO of dfuse, Official Solana Labs Blog

Why move to Solana? The team is getting ‘it done at pace, meets industry expectations of what blockchain should be and have an awesomely skilled team.

What other Projects can Use Solana’s Scalability to Their Advantage?

The perfect projects that should migrate to Solana are ones that are demonstrating high transaction volume along with a solid ecosystem of users, dapps and spends. We then asked our readers for which project should choose Solana.

[forminator_poll id=”102″]

At the time of writing, we have 252 submissions to our reader poll.

  • KIN = 241
  • Brave = 6
  • TikTok, Facebook, Reddit = 2

The Kin Community is super passionate and overwhelmed the blog poll. Well done Kin Fam!

So What is KIN about?

Kin is money for a digital ecosystem of apps and their users. It is design to scale up for mass adoption as app users make millions of microtransactions. Kin have built SDK’s so developers can integrate KIN for Android, iOS, Unity, Python and Node.js, check out the following video to get a full run-down of how Kin works.

Kin: Build to Scale (Improve Acquisition, Increase Retention, and Monetize)

The Kin Rewards Engine

There most innovative aspect is the KRE. It incentivises app developers to create engaging user experiences by rewarding them weekly, when microtransactions occur for in-app earns, in-app spends, cross-app transfers. At the time of writing this article, the latest pay-out data was for the week of 29th March 2020, to the 4th April 2020.

KRE RankingApp NameKin Reward Payout
1Rave1,646,120,787.64 Kin
2MadLipz (iOS)763,814,120.95 Kin
3Perfect365631,152,703.37 Kin
4Kimeo105,058,090.55 Kin
5Super Mechs (iOS)53,086,729.96 Kin
6Trebel Mexico27,688,062.89 Kin
7MonkingMe (iOS)22,389,418.45
8Kinetik21,048,255.73
9PeerBet (iOS)20,830,004.18
10Nearby16,850,159.19
Latest KIN Payouts as per the Kin Website

The Kin Blockchain Key Metrics

Kin has always been about the statistics. You can view their blockchain stats over at Kin.org/stats where you can see Monthly Active Apps, Monthly Active Spending (MAS), Total Unique Spenders and Total Unique Earners. For an in-depth look, check out their Tableau dashboard.

Loving the Kin Stats? Check out the Solana Stats dashboard !

How Does Kin Blockchain Activity Compare to Others?

As of 3rd March 2020, it is the KIN ecosystem that is demonstrating this as shown by leading the Blocktivity chart. Since then, EOS and XLM are back on top (see the EOS dApps on DappRadar).

https://www.blocktivity.info/

The Main Goals of the Kin Blockchain

As per the Kin documentation, Kin will provide a high-throughput, low transaction cost blockchain service that incentives app developers via the Kin Rewards Engine (KRE).

High throughput. It’s our goal to build with you the most used blockchain in the world, and we made sure our blockchain has the capacity to grow.

Kin Rewards Engine (KRE). Each participating developer is compensated by the Kin Foundation for their contribution to the growth of the Kin ecosystem.

Low transaction cost. Kin Blockchain by default charges a very small fee to execute a transaction. This helps prevent spam and denial of service attacks on the blockchain by unknown and untrusted participants.

Kin Architecture – Kin Docs

Have they had any scaling issues?

The Journey of Kin has been a long one. However, they have continued to iterate and innovate their way to 4 million monthly active users. This makes it one of the most used cryptocurrencies in the world. But it’s really just getting started. Pick any app above and download it. You will see in-app Kin transactions taking anywhere between 2 to 10 seconds. This is not an acceptable user experience for modern mobile applications. Kin’s current blockchain has a problem with performance and scalability. Let’s turn this problem into an opportunity.

Related Article: Why Ethereum Projects that Need to Scale are Choosing the Solana Blockchain!

From a technical point of view, Kin started on Ethereum back in 2017. It suffered along with every other Ethereum Dapp the problems of network congestion, low throughput and high gas fees. Pretty much the exact opposite of Kin Blockchain’s Main Goals. The current accepted Transaction Per Second (TPS) of Etherium is 15 TPS. (Source)

Once the team at Kin realised Vitalik’s creation was not cutting the mustard, they kicked off a Migration to a Kin maintained Stellar-fork in March 2019. This blockchain has been serving Kin’s purpose well, with Kin able to scale up as they built out their project ecosystem to 57 Monthly Active Apps and 4 million Monthly Active Spenders!

Kin Testing with Stellar found 10s tx’s at 10 TPS

Now with full control of their own Stellar-fork, the Kin blockchain team were able to tweak the technology to speed it up. Unfortunately, the Kin Blockchain Dashboard doesn’t report on Transactions Per Second (TPS), however the early testing found it could do 10 TPS with transactions times at under 10 seconds. (Even Stellar’s own dashboard doesn’t report TPS, however this articles claim it to be somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 TPS)

Kin Scaling Issues? 3 Hour Outage in April 2020?

In early April 2020, Kin saw explosive growth in app usage as it climbed from 2 million Monthly Active Users up to 3 million! It then experiencing some growing pains.

I cannot confirm this, or how CommercialWishbone was able to quantify the Kin TPS rate at the time (assuming just looking at the Kin Blockchain Explorer average, but it is posted that the Kin blockchain was peaking at 100-120 TPS at the time prior to the 3 hour outage.

Thanks to Kevin, the panic in the community was subdued. Essentially, there was a surge of actual app usage from Rave, this caused blockchain latency to go up, which then triggered TX retry loop of death, which then halted Exchange withdrawals and deposits. Like any good incident, highly skilled engineers got to root cause and fixed the issue.

How can Solana Speed this Up?

As great as it is owning your own blockchain, sometimes it is better to leave it to people who live, eat and breathe Blockchain Scalability.

As you are aware, the Solana MainNet Beta is up and running with 60+ decentralised nodes and comfortably doing 100 TPS. Surge testing has seen it hit 56,000 TPS. Rather than waiting up to 10 seconds for an in-app Kin transfer, imagine blinking and it being completed in 400 milliseconds (0.4 seconds).

You can even watch the Validator nodes processing the transactions in real time now !

Solana is built to scale with industry available hardware and network performance improvements that happen every year! How Fast Can Solana Theoretically Get?

Kin is a fantastic ecosystem, but imagine if the Kin team could focus on onboarding bigger apps, hosting more indie-dev Kin Crypto Challenges, or even getting their Kin SDK back into the Unity Asset Store! These are all the cool things that I know Kin will deliver at pace, if they left scaling blockchain technology to people who invent Proof of History virtual clocks to solve scalability and performance issues.

Do you think Kin would run better on Solana. Please let us know in the comments below or via Twitter!

Want to Learn More About Kin?

Check out their official web page. They have a great FAQ maintained over at their Reddit. You can even sit back, and completely spin out, watching the Kin Bubbles Visualisation – which plots each Kin Blockchain transaction by it’s size as App coloured bubbles!

Not recommended at this time ! #covid

Want to Learn More About Solana?

Feel free to start building with the Solana code, get assistance via the Solana Accelerator or reach out to the team at Solana.

And a big thank you! To the Kin Community for overwhelmingly participating in the Poll. Thanks!

Please, Follow Us and Let Us Know via Twitter if You Think Kin Will Migrate… Again… This time for Good… So Kin Can Crush the Competition!

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