Kin Blockchain Team Reaches 1.2 Million Transactions Per Day, 20 Transactions Per Second on Kik With New Scaling Plan

Kin blockchain was launched with the goal of supporting millions of transactions per day. Earlier today, the company revealed the success its had with recent scaling efforts – including reaching 1.2 million transactions per day and 20 transactions per second in their latest blockchain build.

Kin made headlines last month after the Waterloo, Ontario, Canada-based team announced plans to launch a hybrid blockchain. That blockchain claimed to eliminate transaction fees. Kin was originally going to be built on the Ethereum blockchain. Then, the team migrated to the Stellar blockchain. After being unsatisfied with the transaction capacity of either blockchain, Kin decided to develop its own solution.

Kin plans to make its blockchain available to customers. The company’s first ecosystem partner is Kik, the popular messaging app.

Earlier today, Kin’s team announced specific details on how it plans to scale its blockchain. Kin will showcase these changes with Kik “to demonstrate that Kin blockchain is ready for mainstream scale,” explained Kin’s Technical Product Manager, Tanya Rofman, in a Medium post.

How Did Kin Scale Blockchain Transaction Capacity?

Kin plans to use lessons learned from studying Ethereum and the Stellar network, among other blockchains.

After researching Ethereum in 2017, for example, the Kin team quickly learned that Ethereum would not be able to scale to meet the needs of their blockchain project. The team cited issues regarding scaling, fees, and confirmation times as reasons they could not use Ethereum.

Next, Kin looked at Stellar. Kin’s team sought to maximize transactional capacity on Stellar.

“From a technical POV,” explains Kin in a Medium post, “The results showed Stellar was indeed the best candidate for the Kin Ecosystem. It met our most important requirements – namely predictable fees, network stability, and short confirmation times.”

In March 2018, Kin was ready to launch its platform on Stellar’s public testnet.

Kin launched an experimental token called ATN, or Attention Token. This token was sent when a selected group of Kik users sent and received messages.

Kin’s project ended up reaching more than 4 million transactions, at times exceeding 200,000 transactions per day. Confirmation times were fast, with 97% of transactions occurring in fewer than 10 seconds.

This proved that Stellar’s blockchain was scalable, had high transaction rates, and was ideal for modeling Kin’s own blockchain. However, Kin needed greater transactional capacity to achieve the goals of their project.

Here’s what happened next:

“We learned that in order to support real transactions that are connected to real users we need to set up our own environment. So on May 9th, 2018 we set up our own testnet environment to run the experiment efficiently. In the beginning, we found a few issues and focused on fixing them before hitting production. This test allowed us to fix real production issues in the testnet environment, making this the first step towards a stable Kin blockchain.”

In other words, Kin’s blockchain has progressed beyond the boundaries of the ordinary Stellar testnet environment. The team began testing its platform within their own custom-designed testnet. The next step was to test the blockchain with real Kik messenger users.

How Does Kin’s Blockchian Platform Integrate with Kik Messenger?

The Kin team integrated their Android ATN SDK into Kik’s messenger platform. Basically, this SDK was a wrapper of the Android core SDK. Kik users were selected at random for the test, which was controlled using A/B testing.

With the Stellar implementation, Kin was able to achieve 3.6 transactions per second or about 220,000 transactions per day while targeting only a small number of users (0.05% of the total Kik userbase).

With their own Kin blockchain, however, the team was able to increase the number of Kik users getting exposed to the test. The first iteration of the Kin blockchain increased transactional capacity to 470,000 transactions per day, or about 8.3 transactions per second during peak times.

“This continues to get higher and higher as we go,” explains Kin.

Eventually, Kin was able to open their test to 1% of all Kik users. They eventually achieved a transactional capacity of 1.2 million transactions per day – or 20 transactions per second.

Ultimately, Kin is one of the more exciting blockchain projects in the industry today. The team is using scalable blockchain technology to solve a real-world problem by integrating their Kin blockchain with Kik. You can read the full update on Kin’s scaling achievements on Medium.com here.