SKALE Network

Co-founders Stan Kladko and Jack O’Holleran were connected by friends at Signia Venture Partners and Floodgate in 2017 when they were both looking to build a company in the crypto space. Both were seeking to build decentralized applications and ran into similar issues with scaling and creating a user experience that would not be a bottleneck to growth. Stan came up with the initial SKALE architecture and mechanics as a way to scale the different applications he was working on. During his initial collaborations with Jack, they realized there was a potential market opportunity to create a new high-throughput layer that could work alongside Etheruem and allow new dApps to overcome scaling bottlenecks. Existing blockchains were in need of a scaling solution as the market for new decentralized applications like decentralized exchanges (DEXs), search, and e-commerce was growing rapidly.

That’s when SKALE was born. On Jan. 1, 2018, Jack and Stand formally launched the SKALE Project and received support and seed backing from Signia Ventures and Floodgate. SKALE went on to get support from several other investors in the crypto and blockchain space, including Winkelvoss Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Hashed, and Hashkey, among others.

After two and a half years of development and testing, SKALE announced its phased mainnet rollout plan. Part of this plan was to host a public SKL token sale through ConsenSys Codefi's Activate platform. SKALE became the first project to use Activate's new Proof-of-Use framework for utility tokens, which requires sale participants who purchase tokens to actively “prove their use” of the token (i.e., stake on the network) before they’re allowed to transfer or redeem them.

SKALE launched the first phase of its mainnet on Jun. 30, 2020, which was a restricted version that did not support any staking or token transfer. This was followed by the ConsenSys Activate token sale, which concluded in September 2020 with nearly 4,000 participants across 90 countries. Mainnet Phase 2 launched support for delegation and staking with over 46 validator organizations on Oct. 1, 2020. Mainnet Phase 3, the final phase of mainnet launch, occurred December 1, 2020, coinciding with the unlocking of the tokens that completed their Proof-of-Use period. At that point, the tokens became available on a variety of exchanges including Binance, Huobi, and Uniswap.