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

The cryptocurrency that will soon help power the popular Kik messaging app is making a big technology shift -- again.

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. But today, 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.

While Kik had first envisioned the two-chain system because it worried about transaction fees on ethereum - a blockchain that pushed up against its scale when the crypto-collectable cat game, CryptoKitties, went viral - Kik has decided that even stellar's minimal fees were too much for what the company hopes to accomplish.

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.