What are Atomic Swaps? Explain like I'm five

So. You want to travel to a galaxy far far away but a long journey is not your thing? What do you do then? You take your DNA (could be a strand of hair), encode it into data, and send it to that galaxy far far away.

Now, you go to a dematerializing agency which has a rematerializing agency as a partner in the far far away. This step is essential. As the dematerializing agency scans and disintegrates you, the partner agency rematerializes you. Voila! You have arrived.

With Kik announcing that its kin tokens would be available on both the Ethereum Blockchain, as well as the Stellar Blockhain. The kin token will use Ethereum for liquidity and Stellar for transactions. This essentially closes the debate on which Blockhain is better and opens up new avenues for cross-blockchain transactions.

To overcome the problems of book-keeping, what Kik is doing is splitting the kin token in two. Both tokens are appended with a common metadata. When one token is utilized, the other token (on the other Blockchain) is captured and taken out of the pool.

This means that the kin token can exist on both Blockchains but are not independent of each other.