What is SKALE Metaport? A Deep Dive.

SKALE has seen massive transaction growth in the last few months, thanks in large part to the amazing community and the amazing games that are joining SKALE. Not only are they taking advantage of the incredibly fast finality and zero gas fee transactions, they’re flocking to the network because of the improved user experience that SKALE Network provides. 

To that end, we recently announced that the SKALE Metaport is available for developers to integrate into their dapps. If you’re one of those people that likes to jump to the end of the book to see how it ends, you can check out the documentation and code on Github. 

SKALE’s architecture includes an ever increasing number of SKALE chains on the network. Each SKALE chain has pre-deployed contracts that allow for the sending of messages or tokens to any other SKALE chain via the IMA bridge. It’s incredibly fast (18 seconds or less) and completely gas free. The IMA Bridge has an API layer that allows developers to connect and map different tokens and messages in order to pass them between any two chains. To help developers add this functionality to their dapps, the core team developed the Metaport widget, which is a UI layer that helps interface with the API layers that help facilitate transfers using this bridge. 

One of the most exciting things is that the Metaport can be customized by the developer. That means that the developer can choose when the metaport appears on a website or dapp, what kind of actions the user can take, what tokens are available and even what chains it can connect to. There’s a lot of flexibility built in, and that extends to re-skinning, adding branding and other graphical treatments. 

Games are a great example of one of SKALE’s biggest growth areas. Let’s say you’re playing an on-chain game where you earn ERC20 or 721 tokens.  A developer can design the Metaport to connect with the Europa hub and when a user wants to transfer a token, the widget will pop up. It then guides the user through the process of transferring that token from the game chain to the Europa chain and back again. Additionally, the developer can for example, choose a specific game token in the game, or change it to allow the user to perform any action on any token they wish.  

Metaport is more than just a token transfer mechanism, because it's an open ecosystem, it supports any arbitrary action, from transfer to wrap to swap, or whatever a developer can think of. Developers can create an interface that Metaport binds to, which is important because when transferring a token from one chain to the next, that is only a basic transfer. Given the capabilities that exist on SKALE, users might want to transfer a token and then swap it on a certain chain and then send it back or send back the swap token. Metaport can do all of this because of its flexibility.

Out of the box, Metaport works with all ERC 20 tokens. Soon it will be released to support ERC 721 tokens or NFTs. Soon, thanks to the Europa team, Metaport will have swap capabilities. That means it'll be able to connect into Ruby's swap contracts allowing it to perform simple swap actions. 

Metaport is live today for developers to integrate into their dapps. As with all things SKALE, it’s a community effort and always developing and improving. Currently, many devs in the community are already using it to conduct transfers and give the core team feedback on how they want to use it and improvements and additions they’d like to see.  It’s been a team effort with lots of community involvement, and we’re excited to see where things go from here. 

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For more information on SKALE

View SKALE’s Network Stats
‍Join Discord
‍Documentation on deploying a Dapp to SKALE, can be found in the Developer Portal
‍Click here to learn more about SKALE $SKL token

About SKALE

SKALE is an Ethereum native, modular blockchain network composed of high-throughput, low-latency blockchains that are optimized for Web3 user experience. SKALE chains offer zero gas fees to end-users and have advanced features such as on-chain file storage, interchain messaging, zero-cost minting, ML/AI smart contracts, and enhanced security features.

The SKALE network enables developers to deploy their own EVM blockchain in minutes without sacrificing speed, security, or decentralization. Welcome to the SKALEverse.

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