Our Investment in SKALE Labs: Enterprise-grade Scalability for Adoption

Today, we are proud to announce the mainnet launch of the SKALE Network as an investor and a validator.

Since our investment in early 2019, SKALE has truly evolved to be the “decentralized AWS.” It is a highly configurable fully decentralized network with enterprise-grade technical support, creating seamless workflows for end-users and devs.

Our search for the “dAWS” began in Asia. Several of our portfolios on Ethereum were building up traction in onboarding consumers and started to seek a reliable infrastructure partner to launch new services and grow together. Several early comers in blockchain have claimed to be the decentralized and cheaper alternatives of AWS (ex. “We can be 30% cheaper than using S3 for 30 days”). However, what they have missed is that none of the serious AWS customers actually came to AWS because it was the cheapest solution out there.

Rather, the focus is on the business. It is about building on top of the infrastructure that will continue to evolve and provide the support that their business can stay agile and responsive to the market changes. It is this “trust” that the solution provider will continue to thrive and provide needed support and new features as the customer’s company grows. The worst thing to happen for them is not being able to ship a new service before their competitor because their infrastructure doesn’t allow them for a quick change. Not the marginally bigger cost in their infrastructure.

With innovation happening at the frontline of founders, the crypto industry is arguably the fastest moving space to provide the right infrastructure at the right time. SKALE Labs is doing this in the most professional and structured form to make their customers successful.

SKALE Innovator Program invites the fifth cohort of high-quality developers and founders to build scalable applications on top of the SKALE Network today with a total of 50+ Dapp startups.

Its resemblance to a startup accelerator model is not a coincidence. The SKALE Labs team has been actively discovering and carefully selecting startup teams globally with a strong fit. The startup teams entering the fast-changing blockchain industry today need much more support than just a white paper and Reddit pages.

Over the past years, we were fortunate to have a chance to work with all members of the SKALE team from engineering to marketing, and sales. SKALE Labs is the team that demonstrates how the “trust” mentioned earlier can be built with the trustless decentralized networks as well. They were the first team we have found in the public blockchain space that had a dedicated solution engineering team for customer success.

Jack, CEO, is a veteran technology entrepreneur with a deep background in SaaS and blockchain. He also held an executive role at Good Technology which was acquired by Motorola for ~$500M and subsequently held executive positions in Motorola. With his past experience in building cross Asia and US enterprise software business, Jack has recruited an all-star team to build a cross-border Infrastructure for adoption.

Stan, CTO, brings 19 years of experience in cryptography and enterprise infrastructure technologies. He has founded several Silicon Valley venture-backed startups. Stan was a key early member of the Java Virtual Machine team and was on the founding team of Ingrian Networks with Dan Boneh (co-creator of BLS signatures). He has experience as a researcher at Stanford University and Los Alamos National Lab, where he was named Director’s Fellow. With a Ph.D. in Physics,

Experienced team of engineers at SKALE Labs work with each batch of fewer than 10 teams to successfully complete building businesses on the SKALE Network. 50 startups are in the innovator program with 100+ startups in the pipeline today. Among those, 16 startups are ready to deploy at the mainnet launch. (DeFi and Gaming are the top choices). Additionally, SKALE Network has been consistently one of the most used technologies in the biggest Ethereum hackathons globally.

This effective approach has also proven successful with onboarding 25 top validators and 10 integration partners (wallets, oracles, stablecoins, NFT, and more) in testnet. As one of the node operators from the genesis, we were constantly impressed by clear documentation, strong execution by the SKALE Labs team, and 24/7 technical support.

We asked startups why they are building on the SKALE Network. Here is the summary.

• Full compatibility across the Ethereum ecosystem’s major infrastructures (Solidity, Truffle, Web3.js, remix, etc)
• One-click deployment of highly configurable chains with pooled security: the number of nodes, the consensus algorithm, the state transition machine, the base layer chain security, and more…
• Over 2000TPS with sub-second transactions at zero gas fees
• Run decentralized on-chain file storage in an EVM to host text, image, HTML, and other file formats.
• Money Transfer through SKALE native bridge for ETH, Dai, ERC20, and ERC721.
• Cutting-edge technology research: ex. BLS-Rollup for shrinking an ETH transaction

Along with the mainnet launch, the SKALE labs team hopes to invite broader users to participate in its network this summer. The team has partnered with Consensys Codefi Activate to put their token into work and bootstrap new user engagements through “Proof of Use.”

We are incredibly excited and honored to continue to work with the SKALE Labs team — pushing boundaries of adoption globally by lowering the barrier of entry for truly decentralized web3 infrastructure.

Read more about the launch: here