Following on from its successful initial coin offering (ICO) in September of 2017, Canadian messaging service Kik has officially confirmed that its planned Kin token will leverage not just one, but two blockchains.

The company’s CEO, Ted Livingston, has confirmed that Kin will leverage both the Ethereum and Stellar blockchain – using the former platform for liquidity, and the latter for transactions.

In a press release, Livingston opined that “Creating a bi-directional blockchain with stellar will drive mass adoption of kin by providing faster confirmation times, low transaction fees and scalability.”

The Kin token will accordingly use atomic swaps to trade cryptocurrencies across blockchains – enabling tokens to essentially be ‘split’ across platforms.

Atomic swaps enable tokens to be ‘locked’ on one network, while active on another – meaning that each unit of some 10 trillion Kin tokens present on Ethereum will have a Stellar counterpart.

Accordingly, should the project scale in an unanticipated direction, Kin could accordingly be moved back to rely on the Ethereum blockchain in entirely should Kik so desire.

Stellar founder Jed McCaleb responded enthusiastically to the news, stating that “Kik will be one of the first mainstream projects that uses cryptocurrencies in a meaningful way. It will bring millions more people to this technology and we are super excited to be the platform this will be done on.”

Kik will introduce some 900 billion Stellar-based Kin tokens by the second semester of 2018 for in-app transactions, whereafter users will be able to convert Stellar-based tokens to ERC20 Kin tokens that could be traded on secondary markets.

Kik expects to roll-out wider support for Kin tokens in the near future, wherein users could leverage the new cryptocurrency to purchase digital content such as games or digital art.

The development marks a new phase for the company’s digital currency project, wherein the firm succeeded in raising a whopping $98 million USD during its ICO in September last year.