Announcing the SKALE Project

Jack O'Holleran
Sep 7, 2018 · 7 min read

After many long months of heads down coding and building, SKALE Labs is ready to formally announce the project!

In this post, I’ll share the story of our origin and describe our mission and values.

The Mission

SKALE’s mission is to make it quick and easy to set up a cost-effective, high-performance side chain that runs full-state Smart Contracts. We aim to deliver a performant experience to developers that offers speed and functionality without giving up security or decentralization.

We believe we’ll soon live in a world where hundreds of thousands of blockchains and Smart Contracts will run concurrently at high speeds and low costs. These chains will need to speak to one another, share state, and hold one source of truth. These chains will be a mix of highly secure, slow, expensive, immutable POW chains in Layer 1, and fast, secure algorithmic chains that live in a Layer 2 environment and that are in constant contact with each other and the Layer 1 chains.

About SKALE

SKALE Labs will create and launch the SKALE Foundation, which will run as fully decentralized, peer-2-peer Layer 2 scaling network for dApps that run on layer 1 chains such as Ethereum. The incentives that drive and reward actors in the system are encoded into the protocol with the SKALE Utility Token.

The first SKALE implementation will be on Ethereum. The SKALE team believes in the vision of the Ethereum Foundation and wants to do our part with Layer 2 scaling of Smart Contracts to help the Ethereum ecosystem thrive. SKALE is fully compatible with EVM and solidity.

SKALE’s core team is a made up of 15 builders, 12 of whom are deep math/CS engineers. We now have over 50,000 lines of code and a Network designed to concurrently run hundreds of thousands of SKALE Chains (S-Chains). SKALES’s TestCore S-Chain is capable of running 20,000 transactions per second with ~1 second block times. The design goal is that 800 nodes in the network will be capable of running a cumulative 1 million TPS. The primary application of these S-Chains will be to provide Layer 2 functionality to Layer 1 chains. The unique differentiator of this technology stack is that SKALE can run full-state Smart Contracts in a Layer 2 environment. A bit of research will show that this is very difficult to do — especially at a rate of tens of thousands per second within each Layer 2 S-Chain.

Thanks to SKALE’s containerized infrastructure, the network is flexible enough to support scaling needs of high throughput dApps that need millions of transactions per second (TPS) and more common lower throughput dApps that run into real issues with speed and cost in Layer 1.

Current day costs are a real impediment to dApp innovation. A dApp that runs at an average of 10 TPS will run 864,000 transactions per day. At an equivalent gas cost of $.20 per transaction this is $172,800 per day. SKALE plans to deliver magnitudes greater speed of current POW chains at a small fraction the cost (hundreds not hundreds of thousands of dollars).

A fully functional Ethereum integrated TestNet will be released in October and the first phase of the MainNet is planned for launch in December.

The Story

Stan Kladko and I were connected last year by our friends at Signia Ventures (Thanks, Rick and Sunny!). Stan was running a Big Data startup, Galactic Exchange. For a variety of reasons he decided to turn his focus to crypto, an area he has over 18 years of experience in addition to a PhD in Physics from Max Planck Institute and physics research positions at Los Alamos National Lab and Stanford. Stan was an early engineer at a cryptography startup founded by Dan Boneh in 2000, he then ran one of the first US Government certified crypto labs for 7 years where he did over 400 cryptography certifications for the NSA and other factions of the US Government. He has also started several VC backed networking and big data startups in Silicon Valley.

My entrepreneurial background in Silicon Valley is in Machine Learning/AI, SaaS, Advanced Data Integration, Wireless Cryptography, and Digital Currencies. As a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, a long-time crypto enthusiast and investor, my focus was set on starting my next company in the crypto/blockchain space as I was evaluating business ideas last summer.

Stan was living in Kharkiv, Ukraine when we first met. We spent a lot of time in virtual meeting rooms, discussing important problems that can be solved with decentralized systems. Stan was working on infrastructure for a DEX and other decentralized messaging applications. I eventually flew out to Kharkiv on a very cold and dreary winter day, and we spent time going deeper into the ideas and protocol architectures.

The harsh Ukrainian winter kept us focused and working. As we went deeper, we realized that the primary underlying theme of all of Stan’s brilliant technical architectures was a scalability layer supported by Ethereum’s security that also augmented Ethereum’s ability to run Smart Contracts (very fast) while not losing decentralization.

The vision then became very clear to us: Rather than focusing on a specific execution area or dApp, we could build a scalability layer that supported any Smart Contract use case that required scaling on Ethereum: DEX, prediction markets, decentralized ad exchanges, decentralized search, decentralized e-commerce, in addition to an entire world of decentralized apps that require high throughput and micro-transactions in life science, insurance, finance, healthcare, real estate, internet, and the sharing economy.

On January 1st, 2018 we formally launched the SKALE Project. Thankfully, we had a running start from an engineering perspective as many of the amazing engineers from Galactic Exchange decided to stay and take part in building the solution. (Shout out to Alex Danko, Alex Sheverdin, Artem Payvin, Bogden Blyzniuk, Dima Tkachuk, Natasha Kolenova, and Yulia Timchenko!) We worked hard, put a plan together and received support and seed backing from some amazing investors at Signia and Floodgate.

We set off at a vigorous pace and continued on a path of focused research and architecting. We finalized our design spec in February 2018 and the team went heads down coding 24/7. On April 18, we had a Consensus Core running 20k TPS on a 16 node SKALE Chain cluster with a ~1 second finality. The full design spec calls for a vast network of nodes (we’ll launch with 1,000) and from that larger pool, using cryptographic random entropy, SKALE Nodes are assigned to SKALE Chains (typically 16 nodes). The nodes in the clusters are randomly altered to maintain decentralization and security. A network of just 800 nodes is designed to run over 1 million TPS.

From that point, the team continued to grow and we set forth a detailed plan to launch the network. Chadwick Strange, a Berkeley-based blockchain guru with many years of product and crypto experience, joined us as VP of Product. We continued to add amazing engineers to the team including Dima Stebaev, Dima Nazarenko, Dima Litvinov and Oleg Nikolayev (Yes, we have 4 Dima’s on the team 🙂). And most recently Christine Perry joined the team as Global Solutions Engineer to help our dApp devs use SKALE. BTW — we’re still hiring. If you’re interested, get in touch here or email jobs@skalelabs.com.

We have been extremely fortunate to receive backing from so many amazing investors. We’ll soon be announcing the details of the SAFT financing round, which many world’s top venture capital firms and global crypto funds have financed the SKALE Network.

Our Values

We believe that a decentralized network is only as solid as the values of those who create it. If the creators are honest, transparent, hard-working, and humble, then the network and decentralized community will have similar values. At SKALE, we pride ourselves on these core tenets:

  • Substance over hype — We are builders and put our focus on creating amazing code. We recognize that creating awareness is important, but it only makes sense to do this at the right stage and with a pure purpose.
  • Transparency and honesty — This is the bar for decentralized systems. In the next few months we’ll be transferring all of our code to the SKALE Foundation and will release detailed plans regarding Token Generation Event, use of funds, governance, etc.
  • Work hard and be humble — There is no replacement for effort. And there is no room for arrogance. The core team is made up of some of the most honest and hard-working people I’ve ever worked with. It is amazing to spend time with such talented people who are also humble and relentless in their pursuit toward greatness.
  • Engineering and execution over invention — We leave the invention of crypto math proofs to the world’s top academics who have spent decades researching and defending their work. Rather than invent, we leverage Open Source research and math proofs from the world’s top cryptographers and computer scientists, then design and engineer a system to bring it to market. The research is deep and complex and it takes a great deal of mathematical competence to engineer and code the end network. As CEO of SKALE Labs, I’m fortunate to be surrounded by such a talented team of mathematicians and engineers who have the capabilities to “engineer and execute” the vision.

Lastly, we want to thank all of you who have shown interest over the last several months for your patience. The delay of this announcement goes back to our values. Substance over hype… we like to practice what we preach and we weren’t ready to build the hype until we had a Project of substance.

We look forward to the coming months when we’ll release the network and get the first dApps live on the SKALE Network!! Thanks for your support and we will be following up with more detailed information and a project timeline in the near future.

Thanks to Chadwick Strange

Jack O'Holleran

Written by

co-founder @ SKALE Labs

SKALE

SKALE

Thoughts, ideas, and musings from the SKALE Foundation

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade