Subsidization

Kin runs on the Solana Blockchain, a blockchain built for high scale to support billions of consumers. In order to prevent spam and compensate the validators who run the infrastructure for the network, fees are imposed both for account creations and transactions in the currency ‘SOL’, the native currency of the Solana Blockchain.

In order to onboard users into the crypto economy, many developers will choose to subsidize these fees to make it simple for a new user to get on board. Subsidization creates a frictionless experience for the user to begin to earn Kin and transact within the developer’s application. When developers choose to subsidize, the SOL fees are dealt with ‘behind the scenes’ away from the user experience.

The cost to create a new Kin account is 0.00204928 SOL. This cost consists of 0.00203928 SOL for the account and 0.00001 for the transaction fee to create it.

Presently, the Kin Foundation, through Agora, pays the subsidization costs on behalf of developers, however this will soon change.

Transaction fees are inexpensive and developers can generally subsidize these without any concern. Today, the cost of account creations is expensive but the good news is there are teams actively working to reduce this cost permanently and these changes are expected later this year.

Developers experience the highest subsidization costs when on-boarding an existing user-base into the Kin ecosystem for the first time due to the number of account creations required.

Strategies a developer can implement:

• Crypto related accounts are only created when the user absolutely requires it (see here).

• Gradual roll-out of crypto features to user base, where for example, Kin rewards from the Kin Rewards Engine can be put towards SOL fees to further the roll out.

• Obtaining grants from the Solana Foundation or the Kin Foundation to assist with the cost.

On-boarding reference table

For a more technical description of how subsidization is handled by Agora, see here.