The biggest migration in crypto history? Cryptocurrency Kin is leaving Ethereum

Liam Frost

Odaily Planet Daily Translator: Yu Shunsui

summary:

• Kik, the developer of the blockchain social platform Kin, announced that it will begin migrating the cryptocurrency Kin to the Solana blockchain on December 15.

• Prior to the migration, Solana will undergo a mainnet upgrade to implement some new optimizations for Kin.

• During the migration process, Kin accounts with a balance of $1 or more will be prioritized.

Developers of the cryptocurrency Kin are making final preparations for migrating to the Solana blockchain tomorrow.

According to an announcement released today by Kik Engineering, this will be the “largest migration in crypto history.”

“With over 55 million accounts in the Kin ecosystem, this is the largest migration in crypto history. Given this, we are taking a measured approach to ensure everything goes smoothly,” the announcement said.

Solana is advertised as a high-performance, PoS blockchain that supports smart contracts and decentralized applications. Before migrating, Kin was originally issued as an ERC-20 token based on Ethereum.

Kin developers noted that over the past week, they have run multiple simulations of the upcoming migration on a dedicated multi-node testnet. This has allowed the Solana team to make additional optimizations to make the migration easier. Kik Engineering added that to implement these features, the Solana blockchain will undergo a mainnet upgrade today.

The developers announced, “The latest round of testing, combined with the scheduled mainnet upgrade, gives both teams the confidence to begin the migration on Tuesday, December 15, 2020. We have set the official start time as 14:00 UTC (22:00 Beijing time).”

According to the announcement, during the migration period, accounts with a Kin token balance of at least $1 and active accounts will be given priority. Developers expect this phase of the migration to be completed within the same day.

Meanwhile, low-balance inactive accounts holding less than $1 in Kin will be migrated at a slower pace, expected to take 1-2 weeks (unless the user deposits more Kin and becomes an active account, thereby increasing their priority level).

As previously reported by Decrypt, Kin was launched by Canadian messaging platform Kik through an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017. Since then, Kin has made a lot of headlines, mainly due to its battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

During the lengthy legal process, the regulator claimed that Kik violated Section 5 of the Securities Act, more specifically, that Kik offered and sold securities in the U.S. without registration. In early October, the SEC finally won the lawsuit against Kik over its $100 million ICO.

According to a report by Decrypt in October, Kik stated that after reaching a settlement with the US SEC, although Kik will have to pay a $5 million civil penalty to the SEC, the Kin token and the Kin Foundation itself have escaped from legal trouble.