.png)
.png)
.png)
SKALE April Community AMA Recap: Updates on Technical Progress, Growth, Partnerships, SKALE's Shared Security and App-Specific Chains
SKALE held an April Community AMA with CEO and Co-Founder Jack O'Holleran (@jackoholleran), Head of Development Success Chadwick Strange (@ChadwickStrange), and Head of Sales Conner Murphy (@Connermurphy), offering updates on technical progress, growth, and partnerships. Key takeaways included information on SKALE's shared security and app-specific chains. The AMA session took place on multiple channels, addressing crucial questions within the blockchain industry.
Here's a recap of the key points discussed during the session:
Macro Perspective: The Growth of Web3 Applications
According to Jack O'Holleran, SKALE is witnessing more growth than ever before for developers and companies that want to build web3 applications. He stated that there are a ton of builders more than he has ever seen before, out building and launching, and they know that now's the time to build and grow during these times. O'Holleran mentioned that there's high competition for deals out there now, and people are having to hunt for rounds. It's hard to get into good rounds. He believes that the venture capital community is alive and deploying assets and allocating capital, and it's a good early indicator for builder momentum.
Technical Updates
SKALE's archive node is fully complete and operational, and the 2.1 release is fully functional, operational, and stable. The SKALE project aims to keep improving the stability and performance of the network while integrating even more robust monitoring features. Chadwick Strange led a security audit, and Metaport is all baked and ready, with legal components around who runs the front end and making sure that the compliance element is in place. The 2.2 release is coming out with IMA optimizations, improvements for high-performance dapps, node rotation improvements, archive node enhancements, and more.
Growth Updates
SKALE is finding its sweet spot in the HPD (high performance dapp) market. The project has a unique advantage with zero gas fees for high-performance dapps, especially for DeFi applications. From an onboarding perspective, there's an even more powerful decentralized onboarding that's coming together, with faster, easier, more self-service onboarding for Dapps to get up and running, testing, better documentation, and better understanding of what's happening.
Some of the recent partnerships include DappRadar, with a soon-to-go-live date for SKALE dapp data on the platform, and collaborations with aggregators to build more integrations. SKALE is also focusing on further decentralization of core team components and enabling dapps to go live on Titan, the community chain, and Chaos chain, the test chain.
Partnerships
SKALE aims to partner with companies with sales teams and products that need SKALE and are out there pushing their products in a collaborative fashion, bringing SKALE to market. The power of alliances and formalized partnerships is going to be part of the secret sauce of SKALE to really partner to win.
On-chain Governance
The community asked about the availability of on-chain governance for SKALE, and Jack O'Holleran mentioned that they are very close to pushing a proposal to the forum by the end of the month. He also emphasized that the network is still running in a decentralized manner, and there will be no economic changes until on-chain voting is implemented. The proposal will require positive sentiment in an Ethereum manner to prove before it can move to the next stage.
Updates to the Roadmap
Chadwick Strange provided updates on the roadmap. One of the immediate deliverables is the Metaport Bridge in combination with a new version of Metaport. The Metaport is an embeddable widget that allows SKALE Dapp developers to integrate it into their Dapps, providing a consistent UI to guide users through transferring or conducting operations between any two SKALE chains or any SKALE chain and Ethereum.
Chadwick also mentioned SKALE Oracle, also known as SKALE Connect, which will allow SKALE to read ownership of any asset including NFTs on any other EVM chain without any transferring or custodial components.
Other updates include IMA optimizations for improved performance, stability, and memory improvements to SKALE chains, and SDKs to help the transition of web2 developers entering web3, infrastructure, and tooling for game developers, and DeFi tooling such as on-ramps and bridges.
Community Contribution
Jack emphasized that SKALE is an open-source project, and more people can contribute to GitHub to make the network better. Anyone can see every feature, bug, etc., being worked on in SKALE, which is all built in public, with shared work interfaces that everyone can see.
"SKALE Connect: Opening Up NFTs to Be Utilized for Utility within the SKALE Network"
SKALE Connect is a new feature that will soon be launched by SKALE. Jack O'Holleran explained that SKALE Connect will allow NFTs from various EVM blockchains to be read, utilized, and leveraged for utility within the SKALE network. This means that users who hold NFTs on the mainnet can play games or get certain rights to mint other things on the SKALE chain without having any custodial risk or gas fees to swap anything. O'Holleran expressed his excitement for this feature and the potential it holds for the SKALE Network.
"How Do You Capitalize on the Narrative of Shared Security and App-Specific Chains?"
Conner Murphy addressed this question, stating that the SKALE community has been building for shared security and app-specific chains since 2018. He acknowledged that the industry is finally catching up to the value propositions that SKALE has been pitching around UX and shared security. He also emphasized the importance of leveraging this narrative to extract all the face time possible within the industry and ensure that developers know that SKALE is the best place for them to build applications.
O'Holleran added that shared security chains are already the future for the HPD market because of their speed, cost savings, and great security. He emphasized that the challenge for the SKALE community is to make sure people know about these features.
"Is There MEV on SKALE, and Does MEV Affect the SKALE Network?"
Chadwick Strange answered this question, explaining that MEV has been a huge discussion on Ethereum. He pointed out that on Ethereum, a transaction could happen, but it's not final, and in that period of time, a validator or a miner can go and actually reorder things or take advantage of this insight and front run transactions.
However, on SKALE, there is instant finality. The time to finality is the same time as the block time. This means that the second a transaction happens or millisecond the transaction happens is the same millisecond the block is finalized because it's instant. Strange emphasized that this feature puts SKALE in a different environment where MEV is very much reduced.
"How Is the SKALE Team Going to Attract More Chain Subscribers?"
O'Holleran explained that it only takes minutes to deploy a new chain on SKALE. However, the network can run around 80 chains right now with the current minimum stake, the MSR and the setting and the node sizes. He added that if the chain sizes were smaller and the MSR were lower, the same number of validators could run thousands of chains, but each chain would have less throughput and less capacity and less storage. Therefore, the number of chains on SKALE is limited by the chain sizes. He also pointed out that dapp developers have expressed their desire to start partnering up and have a lot of them go on one chain, like Nebula, a gaming chain. Titan is also expected to be a community chain for different non-games.
What about Web3 Gaming and Zero Gas Fees?
Web3 gaming is a relatively new field, and it has evolved over the years from first-generation games that were skin DeFi products to more innovative games that incorporate blockchain technology into their game mechanics and incentivization models. Developers have had time to think about how they can leverage blockchain technology to make games more fun, engaging, and provide ownership to players. As a result, we are now seeing innovative games with unique features that are only possible on a blockchain.
Real players and companies from web2 are already moving into web3, but the scale of web2 still dwarfs that of web3. One of the reasons for this is that the user experience (UX) in web3 games is not yet on par with that of web2 games. However, the ownership and incentivization models that are inherent in blockchain technology provide a unique selling point for web3 games. Once UX in web3 games improves to the level of web2 games, we can expect to see more players and companies move into the web3 gaming space. There are certain areas where there is less friction for launching casual games and browser games compared to console games, and that web3 will see a lot of growth in the next few years.
Chadwick Strange explained that SKALE works with zero gas fees by having a gas token called sFUEL on every SKALE chain. The network is paid upfront or rented for a part of the bandwidth, and the user can transact on that network with the free sFUEL gas token. SKALE also has a connection to Binance Chain, and SKALE zero gas fees are a strong value proposition for lower-cost chains like Binance.
Conclusion
The SKALE April Community AMA highlighted the project's technical advancements, growth, and collaborations. With increasing interest from builders and entrepreneurs, SKALE is concentrating on enhancing its network's stability and performance, while also expanding monitoring capabilities. The project aims to excel in the high-performance dapp market and is focusing on partnerships and decentralization for further growth. SKALE Network is progressing towards on-chain governance and has several updates on its roadmap. Community input is strongly encouraged for the network's continuous development. To learn more about SKALE, visit their website or join their Discord community.
For more information on SKALE:
Deploying a Dapp to SKALE
