We will still be migrating to a stable alternative blockchain to Ethereum (e.g. Stellar) in the short to medium-term.
We are still in the IPLv2 launch phase and as expected are experiencing plenty of choke points due to the nature of Ethereum's network. This was written about quite extensively in recent blog posts (
https://medium.com/kin-contributors/ethereum-challenges-while-launching-iplv2-8a33e1ba5a64).
In the meanwhile we are in the process of benchmarking alternatives, currently Stellar, and verifying their performance is what they claim to be.
However, in the long-term (years ahead) we will probably have to find a solution more tailored to our needs.
Stellar is a great company with plenty of experience and a good, mature, stable product - its blockchain technology. In our opinion it's one of the best out there currently in terms of maturity and transaction scale, which is one of our top priorities to allow us to move forward quickly with our product without wasting time.
Along with this, Stellar's objective as a business is directed to another industry than us, mostly banks, while we target consumers and mobile. We have different requirements that we will compromise for now but will eventually have to tackle later on in some way e.g. Fee predicatbility, smart contract support, mobile-first agenda, etc.
As an established company, it's unwise to focus on multiple top-level objectives at once - in our case building a crypto ecosystem for mass use with a large user base, along with developing an entire consumer grade blockchain technology. The latter is a huge, resource heavy task that can and should be the focus for an entirely separate project. Our relationship with ORBS is to achieve this objective, while still allowing us to focus on the first one. This is a long-term partnership which will take a long time to mature, and will not affect Kin in the short to medium term, which is why I first stated that we will still be migrating to a stable alternative like we said we would.
When all is said and done - The technology we are using now (Ethereum), the one we will be using for the short to medium term (e.g. Stellar), and the one we will be using for the long term (e.g. ORBS) is just a means to and end, and is a secondary objective to the primary one - which is to bring crypto to the masses in a stable, mature, perfomant, and affordable way.