An Introduction to Skytale
CEO Enrico Mariotti introduces Skytale, and explains why he decided to found the company
What gave you the idea for Skytale, and what problem are you trying to solve?
The idea came from my personal experiences as a crypto investor. I’d been investing for about the last five or six years — as a programmer, I was captivated by the programmable possibilities of Ethereum — but at some point the landscape changed and things started to become more complicated.
In the last two years, so many new investment opportunities have arisen: DeFi, staking, NFTs, and of course the various combinations and intersections of all of these. For example, it’s now possible to fractionalise NFTs and to use them in DeFi, but keeping track of everything can be really difficult as they all tend to be siloed in their own infrastructure.
Layer 2 and the creation of new networks has also increased the complexity: once, it was all about Ethereum but now we have Layer 2 solutions such as Polygon as well as entirely new networks like Binance Smart Chain and Fantom. And of course, we are still waiting for DeFi in Cardano!
There are also so many more exchanges now, both centralized and decentralized. In the past, most trading happened through centralized exchanges such as Kraken or Binance, whereas in the last two years, DEXs (decentralized exchanges) such as UniSwap and SushiSwap have attracted billions of dollars in trades. And all this makes it quite hard to keep track of open positions across different funds and pools.
I realized that it was not just me who was finding it difficult to understand how to handle multiple long-term holdings and transactions at the same time. It’s a pain point for so many people — and for companies as well as individuals.
I realised that many of the same problems that individual investors face are also pain points for enterprises. There are now crypto-native startups and other organisations who need to keep track of expenses or payments they have made with different cryptocurrencies.
There is now, more than ever before, a focus on regulation, compliance and tax reporting, and Skytale simplifies the process of reporting crypto transactions, which would otherwise be a laborious process.
In summary, DeFi is booming, and we want to take away some of the pain points and make it something that is easy for any individual or company to participate in.
Please describe briefly how Skytale’s solution solves these problems
Imagine you are approaching the end of the tax year and you need to figure out your profits, losses and expenses. For someone who is used to using a traditional bank account, this process is simple. But if you have been transacting in cryptocurrencies across different networks and exchanges, there is no easy way to filter and aggregate these transactions for reporting purposes.
Additionally, while investors can use spreadsheets or some other tools to track their transactions and see which have been more profitable, Skytale allows them to view their transactions across multiple networks and exchanges, and filter and sort these in a clear and user-friendly way.
Essentially, we are offering three separate ways for people to engage with Skytale:
- Via the user interface: either individuals or CFOs can view their transactions via the Skytale dashboard
- Via the API: companies may develop their own dashboards that will consume the data we provide
- Via a third party: we offer a B2B2C solution where other enterprises operating in the crypto space may want to offer their customers the facility to track their transactions chronologically
So we are offering these straightforward B2C and B2B solutions — but we have also identified a third potential use case: providing a B2B2C solution where other enterprises operating in the crypto space may want to offer their customers the facility to track their transactions chronologically.
What can a typical user expect to find when they see the application for the first time?
When a user signs up for the first time, they are prompted to provide their email address. Instead of building an authentication system and storing user credentials ourselves, we believe that passwordless authentication — in other words, handing over password management to a third party — is the most secure option.
We have integrated with MagicLink, who will send the user a secure sign-in link every time they access Skytale.
This is the customer journey for a user — either an individual or an enterprise — who is accessing Skytale via the user interface. Of course, if a company decides to access Skytale via the API and thus integrate it into their own customer-facing application, then the user experience may be different.
However the core featureset and the benefits the end user will derive from Skytale’s services remain the same, whether the user interface is Skytale’s own, or a white-label solution..
What features will the user be able to access once they are logged in?
Once they are logged in they can register the public key of their wallet(s) and, optionally, their exchange accounts. We currently support 12 different exchanges and 10 different layer 1 and layer 2 networks, but are constantly adding to this number.
We store the public key only so that our users don’t have to worry about their private keys being compromised. In other words, we are a read-only service.
The moment the user imports their public key, this information is indexed in our search engine, allowing the user to access it in a timely manner, without the delay associated with other services, and how they can quickly list the results of any query: for example: all transactions that added liquidity to Binance Smart Chain pools within a custom time period.
We provide the ability for users to tag their transactions. During the customer discovery phase, we realised people needed to be able to do this so that when they filter and export particular transactions into a .csv file — for example, for tax purposes — they are able to see at a glance which transactions are classified with specific tags.
As you can see from the screenshot it is easy for the user to filter and aggregate their transactions so they can see at a glance the history of the transactions they have made on a variety of different exchanges and networks.
What upcoming features are you most excited about?
We are currently building a machine learning classification engine, which will open up a whole new featureset: for example, allowing users to distinguish between standard transactions, airdrops, and especially unsolicited airdrops. As recent events have shown, airdrops are sometimes not the positive experience they appear to be.
Some airdrops are scams or malicious attacks. For example, I received an airdrop from TheVera.io which, if I had approved it, would have compromised my wallet. So implementing the classification engine component will offer a whole new layer of security for our users. We will be focusing on Binance Smart Chain initially, followed by Fantom, Polygon and of course, Ethereum.
We are also offering users the chance to integrate with different taxation and accounting solutions. Our first integration will be with QuickBooks, and we will later provide the same functionality for Xero and TurboTax.
Who do you see as your competitors?
We recognise that we are not the only player in the market, and Zerion and Zapper are probably closest in terms of competition. However, these are both very much front-end solutions aimed solely at the end user, so our first distinct point of difference is being able to provide an API to other businesses. This means that we can also offer Skytale as a white-label solution offering a frictionless experience for other enterprises.
Secondly, while Zerion and Zapper offer few alternatives to Ethereum, Skytale currently supports 10 networks and by the end of the year, we will support 25 more.
Finally, we are faster than the solutions that have to query the blockchain every time they search because we store and index the information. This allows our users to enjoy the same consistent experience on multiple devices, unlike solutions that simply search for transactions and store them in the browser.
