Multicoin Capital, a blockchain investment company announced that it led a $9.65 million investment round in SKALE, the first solution that delivers a commercially usable Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on a plasma chain. SKALE chains provide the same security guarantees of the Ethereum main chain, and thousands of times more performance. Because SKALE chains support the EVM, developers can port existing Solidity code with almost no changes.
Since Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon published the original plasma paper a year ago, the Ethereum Foundation and the Ethereum community more broadly have come to recognize the challenges of running the EVM on a plasma chain.
As the Ethereum community has come to recognize these challenges, most plasma discussions have opted to drop full EVM support in favor of more limited Plasma Cash and Plasma Debit implementations. These implementations facilitate asset transfer for fungible and non-fungible assets, but don’t support the EVM, meaning that these other Plasma implementations cannot process any sophisticated logic or support robust applications such as Augur, Cryptokitties, or a 0x-based relayer.
The single biggest issue in Ethereum is scalability. Ethereum is at 90% capacity, and there is almost no dapp usage today. SKALE aims to be one of the most important pieces of infrastructure that helps Ethereum fulfill the Web3 vision.
SKALE is Ethereum-first, but not Ethereum-only. Developers building on non-Ethereum chains will need the same layer 2 scaling solution, and SKALE aims to serve them in time.
This feeds the SKALE network effect, improving the quality of the SKALE network for existing users: the more demand there is for SKALE chains, regardless of origin, the larger, faster, cheaper, and secure the SKALE network becomes.
Most importantly, SKALE is live in the real world today and is opening up into beta this quarter. The mainnet is launching early next year.
Kyle Samani, Manager Directory of Multicoin Capital stated the following regarding the Skale team:
“The SKALE team is one of the most well-rounded teams I’ve had a chance to work with. Jack O’Holleran, CEO, is an extremely humble and experienced enterprise SaaS entrepreneur, having been an executive at Good Technology helping take it to a 9-figure acquisition. He’s also founded multiple highly-technical startups that have gone on to raise significant venture funding and produce substantial equity value. Jack is an experienced operator: he provides not only product leadership, but has done an excellent job in the fundraising process, and is recruiting an all-star team of VPs to execute in each functional area.”
“Stan Kladko, CTO, earned a Ph.D. in Physics and has built a number of technical startups over the last decade in technical leadership roles, and he’s one of the better known technical leaders in the Ethereum community. Most of the Ethereum community know Stan not as Stan, but as kladkogex, his name on the EthResearch forums. He has assembled an amazing team of engineers, mathematicians, and crypto economic security experts to build SKALE. He’s also recruited a few math, physics, and computer science olympiads to the SKALE team.”