What Is SKALE (SKL): How It Works & Where To Buy It

As the popularity of blockchains is ever-increasing, one factor that doesn’t seem to follow the trend is speed and capacity. With more and more user and developer activity, the blockchains themselves never prepared for this amount of user and developer participation in Web3.

Well, bring in the SKALE network (SKL), the project built to assist and support the tremendous growth decentralized applications (dApps) have seen on the Ethereum network.

The SKALE network is made up of a combination of layer one and layer two protocols which are used for scalability and interconnecting of various blockchains taken care of by the SKALE manager.

What this means is developers can take their projects from the Ethereum network and place them into any of the administered blockchains on the SKALE network for excellent throughput without having to pay high gas fees.

 

How Does SKALE (SKL) Work?

The SKALE network SKL uses Elastic Sidechains, which are essentially independent blockchain systems integrated with another blockchain environment; in their case, they use Ethereum’s blockchain.

Sidechains possess certain aspects that users can change to fit their needs; that is why they’re known as “elastic” sidechains.

When developers are building and designing their dApps on the unique SKALE protocol, they have the ability to adjust the sidechain to fit the specifications they require, for example, virtual machines, consensus protocols, security protocols, or parent blockchains.

After constructing the sidechain to meet their needs, developers also have the option to pay a monthly subscription to continue using the sidechain and host the decentralized application.

The way smart contracts work on any sidechain is to communicate with the mainnet contracts, and this makes interoperability possible between Ethereum and SKALE. Users who decide to use the elastic sidechains will get access to Ethereum’s mainnet.

After the developers have built the dApp and want to test it, they can do it on the SKALE sidechain because the front-end mainnet of the dApp will still work in the case of a bug or crash.

The SKALE network also uses its sidechain to process transactions; it has the ability to validate multiple transactions at the same time. After the validation on the sidechain, it gets sent to Ethereum for bulk verification.

The reason why this is important is that SKALE chains can assist with transactions when there is any network congestion.

 

What Is SKALE Used For?

The problem developers have to deal with due to the Ethereum blockchain’s popularity is the network getting congested; this makes testing, transactions, creating, and other dApp functionalities nearly impossible.

Ethereum still uses the proof-of-work protocol, which has been discovered to be less efficient than the proof-of-stake protocol. However, this is where SKALE chains take care of the efficiency problem with the interconnection of elastic sidechains.

There is always the chance of gas fees skyrocketing on the Ethereum blockchain; when this happens, deploying your dApp can become extremely expensive, unprofitable, and also unsustainable; this is where the SKALE network (SKL) becomes an excellent alternative for Ethereum dApp developers.

 

Where To Buy SKALE (SKL)

Before you decide to buy SKALE network tokens, you’ll need fiat currency. The amount of fiat currency will depend on the current SKALE network price and how many tokens you want.

Then, you’ll need to look for a centralized exchange that has the token listed.

Below you’ll see some of the most significant exchanges available:

• Bitstamp
• Uphold
• Binance
• KuCoin
• HTX Global

When you’ve chosen your desired exchange, you can go ahead and register on the platform, deposit your fiat currency and purchase your SKALE tokens. You’ll also need a digital wallet if you want to store your tokens.

There are multiple wallets to choose from, like MetaMask, Trust Wallet, or Edge Wallet.

Note: This is not financial advice and shouldn’t be seen as such; this article is for educational purposes only.

 

Biggest Competitors Of SKALE Network

The SKALE network has seen an increase in competition before and after launching the project, but that didn’t scare them off; they continue to grow and show exactly why they are here to stay.

Some of the biggest competitors for the SKALE Network are as follows:

• Solana
• Polkadot
• Dfinity Network
• A-Qube

 

What Are The Future Plans For SKALE?

So far, DeFi analysts have seen SKALE chains do a great job with both growth and the ability to deliver exactly what was promised.

Even though the company saw a modest start in the beginning by adding some helpful features to the ecosystem, they saw a remarkable daily increase of developers building projects on the elastic sidechains, not to mention the good return they provide for investors.

The SKALE network aims to increase its ability to assist the Ethereum network with scaling and integration to provide more developers to build dApps on SKALE’s sidechains.

One of the main goals they want to achieve is to make decentralized application development easy, fast, and free for all users. They want to build on the compatible Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) blockchains and also incorporate games and NFTs into the ecosystem.

 

Pros And Cons Of SKALE (SKL)

Pros:

• Safety: The company has a SKALE manager contract which ensures the safety of the network. These types of contracts are set out to choose a pool of validators at random, which will be appointed to validate any transactions coming through the blockchain.
• Consensus Mechanism: Each chain employs the Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanism, which can communicate with other chains through a secure interchain protocol. This consensus will allow a third of the nodes to act maliciously, inadequately, or go offline. If the number becomes bigger than one-third, the entire elastic sidechain will halt for a brief moment until there is a minimum of two-thirds active and functional nodes.

Cons:

• There is still much growth regarding the SKALE network; you’ll always find a few bugs lurking about that need fixing.
• The sidechains also need some upgrades done before they can function according to the plans the SKALE network wants to achieve.

 

FAQs About SKALE (SKL)

How long has SKALE existed?

The SKALE network was founded by Stan Kladko and Jack O’Holleran in 2018, during which they also established the SKALE foundation. Both founders bring a vast array of expertise within the crypto and blockchain space to the project.

Kladko has a background in cryptography enterprise infrastructure technologies spanning almost two decades, and O’Holleran has years of experience in artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and also machine learning.

Stan Kladko is also involved with Ethereum as a top contributor to both Ethereum research and the Ethereum foundation.

What’s controversial about SKALE?

There has been a lot of controversy around the security of the SKALE network and how it plays out with the development of dApps, but let’s take a closer look at how SKALE nodes take care of its security to calm the worries.

Network Security:

The SKALE network is powered by its native SKL token, which also plays an integral part in keeping the SKALE network secured.

There is always the chance that the smaller the sets of SKALE nodes are more susceptible to corruption, so validators have to ensure that those small nodes don’t get compromised; how they achieve this in the SKALE network is through a pool validation model with specific node validators.

A huge number of validator nodes that work on various arbitrary tasks that are randomly assigned safeguard the network.

In order to maintain the highest level of security while making the most of the network’s resources, the nodes responsible for any validation are also automated to rotate frequently.

Validators’ nodes must stake a significant quantity of SKL tokens to improve the network’s overall security. Staked tokens are stored on the Ethereum network through smart contracts controlled by the SKALE manager.

The smart contract mentioned here monitors and manages token economic inflation on the SKALE network; it also pays monthly payouts to validators as an incentive for the staked tokens through validating nodes to protect the network.

How many SKL tokens are there?

SKALE tokens have a max supply of 7,000,000,000, with a total supply of 4,276,664,349. It also has a circulating supply which comes to 3.68B SKALE tokens.

Can SKL be mined?

SKL tokens are not able to be mined. So instead of relying on miners to secure the network or validate transactions, SKALE chains have validator nodes who stake the SKALE token to various pools on the network, which in turn powers the ecosystem.

When users stake their tokens, they can receive SKL rewards in the form of incentives for the validator SKALE node.

You also have the option to trade the SKL token in the cryptocurrency market on exchanges to generate a profit.

What is the market cap of Skale?

The total market cap of the SKALE network token (SKL) is $189,804,468, together with a fully diluted market cap of $361,287,572. The token 24h trading volume stands at $113,682,458 at the time of writing.

 

Resources:

https://www.coindesk.com/price/skale/

https://currency.com/skale-skl-price-prediction

https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/getting-started/crypto-education/skale-skl

https://www.securities.io/investing-in-skale-skl-everything-you-need-to-know/

https://blockster.com/skale-skl-what-is-it-and-is-it-a-good-investment/

https://morioh.com/p/c46ce61d512a

https://skale.network/blog/why-multichain-networks-matter-and-other-advantages-of-skale-chains