COURSE OUTLINE
OVERVIEW
SECTION ONE: — WHAT IS SKALE NETWORK?
SECTION TWO: SKALE PROTOCOLS
SECTION THREE: SKALE MAINNET
SECTION FOUR: SKALE TOKEN(SKL)
CONCLUSION
OVERVIEW
Blockchain is a system created/invented, in order to record information and make it impossible to hack or change.
Bitcoin is currently the largest and the most popular and the most popular blockchain in the world right now, Ethereum is another blockchain and it supports ETH token as its currency, It act as a distributed computing platform which uses smart contract functionality and having a virtual currency element.
A lot is really happening in blockchain industry lately, with various industries raising funds through ICO and launching their projects on Ethereum public main net network.
If you are following what is going on in Ethereum network closely or you check gasnow you will notice a lot of clutches in the Ethereum network which causes the transaction gas fee to be very high, especially when ETH value is going up. The demand for Ethereum is getting high day by day, and you may agree with me that Ethereum need an elastic Layer 2 Technology Sidechain.
This is where SKALE Network comes in. SKALE network is designed to bring application structures to developers which will result in enhanced configuration and modulation. SKALE network will help decentralized application(dapps) developers to speed up the development of smart contract with increased performance, and SKALE EVM compatibility will allow dapps builders to make use of Ethereum’s existing developer tools.
SECTION ONE: WHAT IS SKALE NETWORK?
SKALE NETWORK is built in order to form an elastic sidechain with Ethereum network.
SKALE network is an elastic blockchain network that is built with an Ethereum compatibility, the major use of this network is to form a flexible/elastic sidechain for the Ethereum network.
SKALE network provides a Layer 2 solution to the Ethereum network, it comes with the aim of scaling smart contracts for Ethereum, this gives developers on the network the ability to create App-Specific sidechains, all these are secured by SKALE VALIDATORS. SKALE employ the use of BLS signature and deposit boxes within the Ethereum mainnet.
SKALE network consists of thousands of independent validators nodes which boast of layer 1 security blockchain network in an efficient and versatile way. This network can support up to 8,000 independent chains, and these chains can even span from small sidechains to large private or public chains, and they will be operated in a very fast rate with a low transaction throughput.
SKALE is a network of independent mini-chains (dynamic shards) which exist one layer above the Ethereum blockchain. These mini-chains has the capability to process token transfer and decentralized applications(dapps). Each of the chain uses a randomly selected batch of network’s validator pool authenticate transactions and change state. The SKALE network is a service platform developed to support the growth of the Ethereum blockchain network by easing the network traffic.
SKALE network give a smooth and scalable and scalable passage for the independent blockchains and subchains into the Ethereum public main net. The existence of SKALE network on both Ethereum network and SKALE network nodes give it an edge among its competitors.
SIDECHAIN TECHNOLOGY
The network consists of configurable network of elastic sidechains which supports high-throughput and low-computing transactions, with a low transaction charges, this network offer expanded storage capacity along with fixed connectivity and interchain messaging within the Ethereum system mainnet.
In SKALE Network, Side chain is introduced in order to allow users to use their token in different blockchains, this will give room for inter-chain transactions and even the gas fee will be cheaper at a very great speed. For the configuration: the developer will need o configure their chain through a decentralized interface and after that, submit the payment to the network in form of SKALE TOKEN
This is operated by a group of computed subnodes set aside from the larger set of the nodes in the network. The sidechain uses the nodes computation and storage resources ranging from different portion of the node’s resources, these resources are based on the size of the selected chain. Each of these chain makes use of an asynchronous byzantine fault tolerant as its consensus mechanism and messages can be sent though interchain messaging pool.
TECHNICAL HIGHLIGHTS
- Near-Zero gas fee: This network ensures there is a very low gas transaction fee when transacting through the network, this will also attract users to this network.
- Node Rotation: This network selects different portion of nodes and there is room for rotation of the nodes.
- Ethereum Compatibility: This network can work on any layer of Ethereum from ERC-20 to ERC-777
THE PROBLEM SKALE NETWORK IS SOLVING
It will scale the transaction throughput, It will enhance better user experience by enjoying a fast transaction per second speed, SKALE network will also offer expanded storage capabilities, interchain messaging within the Ethereum mainnet
WHY SKALE NETWORK?
SKALE network prevent security risk by making use of pooled validation model, the pooled validation model leverages all the security advantage provided by large numbers of validator nodes by using random nodes. Using SKALE network will be a brilliant idea because of its effectiveness in building and scaling Ethereum-based applications, and it will also open up the prospects for an ever-expanding spectrum of use cases from games, media applications and decentralized finance to productivity. The primary benefits of SKALE network are near-zero gas costs, increased transaction throughput, faster commit times, better user interface and user experience and so on.
SKALE MANAGER
The SKALE MANAGER will handle the connection of SKALE’s App-specific chains to the Ethereum.
The SKALE MANAGER serves as the entry and the exit point to all other smart contracts in the SKALE network system. Dapps will deposit their token to the SKALE MANAGER’s smart contract which will then mint corresponding token on the apps-specific chains. They manage and arrange all the entities within the network including Node Creation, Node Destruction, Sidechain Creation, Sidechain Destruction, Withdrawal and Bounties.
· Node Creation: For a node to be added to the network system, there will be an assessment from the SKALE daemon, this is to check if the node meets the network hardware requirements, if this stage is passed, the SKALE daemon will send a grant request to the SKALE MANAGER, the network deposit and node metadata will be included in this request, after committing the request to the Ethereum network , It will either be added as a full or frictional node. The node is added to a large group of peer nodes and will be randomly assigned to a network. Node downtime will be recorded before epoch time in order to determine node’s bounty reward.
· Node Destruction: Before exiting the network, the node must make an exit request and wait for finalization period, the finalization period can be any amount of days and if approved the node will be able to exit and withdraw initial stake from the network.
ELASTIC SIDECHAIN CREATION
The consumer will submit their configuration and payment to the SKALE manager when creating their elastic sidechain, the configuration will include the duration they plan to use in the network and also the amount of resources needed. SKALE manager gives users the privilege of choosing elastic sidechain in which the minimum is 16 virtualized subnodes, each virtualized subnodes is either using 1/128(small), 1/16(medium) or the large which is 1/1 of each resource, as time goes on, the network will allow the users to specify the number of virtualized subnodes. As the network matures, the number of resources used will be calculated, this is to account for current network condition.
A new Elastic Sidechain will be created by the SKALE manager after receiving the creation request, and its endpoint will return to the respective creator.
VIRTUALIZED SUBNODES
In other protocol, virtualized protocol is restricted to one-on-one mapping between the participant network, but in SKALE network, it is possible. SKALE network make use of containerized virtualized subnodes architecture on each node, this allows each to run multiple elastic sidechains at the same time. In SKALE network, the subnodes are referred to as Virtualized Subnodes.
The containerized architecture was selected in order to conduct enterprise grade performance and optionality for dapps developers to be in the same league with centralized system. The containers are divided into five (5) main components which ship along with a dockerized Linux OS which gives each node the freedom to be hosted in an OS-agnostic manner. Each of the containers are then sum up into one of the following services.
- Skale Admin Service: The admin service is like a human projector for the SKALE service, This will allow the nodes to view the Elastic sidechain they are on, It will also give them the ability to stake, deposit, withdraw and also claim SKL tokens, there will be no interface for joining or leaving the network because virtualized node within the node as assigned randomly.
- Node Monitoring: The function of the NMS is to track the performance of each node peer’s node. When tracking the performance, we will measured in both latency & uptime and it will then pass through a regular process which alert each of the peer nodes and then log it into the local database, from there, these metrics will be averaged and submitted to the SKALE managers, the manager will determine the reward/payout these node will get at the end of each Elastic sidechain epoch.
- Virtualized Subnode Orchestration Service: The function of the VOS is to organize the estimation of node and storage resources that will instantiate the virtualized nodes with the help of an effectively created virtualized subnode image consisting of SKALE daemon, Inter messaging transfer Agent and the Elastic sidechain Catchup Agent, This service is also responsible for the relocation of resources to virtualized subnodes that has been deactivated or shut down.
ELASTIC SIDECHAIN DESTRUCTION
This process will happen once a consumer’s rental deposit on the network has exhausted, or they willingly flagged their elastic sidechain for destruction. The process will send any available crypto asset from the Ethereum to their owners on their mainnet, hard reset and storage clearing process will happen before rewarding the submitter who commissioned the chain destruction.
SKALE NETWORK VALIDATORS
First of all, Validators are the group of people or miners who acknowledged/verified any incoming transactions.
SKALE network is fortunate to have some sets of experienced miners and developers in the Ethereum network. And also, many of the initial SKALE validators will also provide support in ETH2.
Over 700 requests were made from varieties of Validator Teams around the world during its pre-launched, but on October 1st, 2021. the selected ones are contacted and were approved for Mainnet Phase 2.
SKALE Validators are set of experienced miners for a number of Proof of Work (PoW) and also Proof of Stake (PoS) networks including Cosmos, Terra, ETH2, Polkadot &Kushama, Solana and many more. The set of validators have years of experience in complex infrastructure setup and orchestration. All these are backed with solid history with EVM, SKALE network Validators are located across various countries in the globe including, Canada, US, Singapore, Korea, India, Germany, Hong Kong, Finland, Romania and many more countries. Before the validators started working on the ecosystem, they participated in the SKALE network Testnet in early 2020, this got them familiar with the set up and node operation in the SKALE network ecosystem itself. SKALE’s Testnet ran non-stop from May 2020 till late August in an accelerated mode, it worked through an equivalent of more than 70 years of network life without crashing even for once. And lastly, the validators also got familiar with SKALE containerization & virtualization innovations which push it ahead of competitors.
ETHEREUM VIRTUAL MACHINE (EVM) compatibility in elastic sidechains will give room to dapps developers in order to deploy an already existed Ethereum based smart contract with a low gas limit.
MESSAGING
SKALE network propose a messaging protocol which allow users to communicate within their different inhabitant, users of the dapps will be able to transfer digital assets and calling of smart contracts across the sidechains. Several combinations of smart contracts, BLS signatures and fork-less consensus made this functionality possible.
SMALL SCALE PRODUCTION TO LARGE SCALE PRODUCTION
SKALE network is an expandable network, It has the ability to be expanded into different sidechain,
Developers will get access to one or more elastic sidechains once they select the chain and the stake their tokens. The network is an easy solution for both small scale and large production.
It can move from a limited transaction size to a large chain with 2000 transaction per seconds, and also it comes with high storage capacity.
SECTION TWO:- SKALE PROTOCOLS
NEXTGEN PoS-BASED NETWORK
This system was used in order to inspire a proper ethical behavior among the network participant, each participant must stake a fixed or agreed amount of their SKL token to be cut off if they engaged in an act that is not accepted by the network, The network have their rule and regulation and if any participant engaged in an unacceptable act, the will be penalized by removing a particular amount of token from their token. This include participants who failed to properly participate in the consensus and it also regulate the latency standard enforced by Network-agreed-upon SLAs.
SKALE DELEGATION & BOUNTY
DELEGATION: This can be defined as an act of providing the overall staking amount needed for running a node for a bargained percentage of proceeds earned from Validating process.
DELEGATOR: They are the set of people who stake with a validator and wait to earn reward, even though it is up to the validator whether to agree the deal or not.
EPOCH: This is the period when the month start to the end of the month, the bounties of the validators and delegators are calculated in this particular period and they will receive their payout accordingly after this period.
BOUNTY: This can be defined as the reward earned per node registered in the network.
PROCESS OF SKALE DELEGATION
The Delegator will propose a delegation to the validator, the validator will now decide whether to accept or reject the proposed agreement, and if accepted it will provide bounties opportunities to the delegator in the near future, and if the validator decided not to accept the request, then the delegator can cancel and move on to another validator. And all the accepted delegation’s status will be open from the first day of each month to the last day of the month, this process will stay like that unless if the token holder decide to stop their delegation and doesn’t wish to auto-delegate., They will need to make an un-delegation request, This process is called Un-delegation request, and the issue with this request is that it must not be 7 or more days prior to epoch. And if the un-delegation requests are successful the delegation process will be completed ahead of its original time.
WITHDRAWAL PROCESS FOR VALIDATORS & DELEGATORS
The commission fees and rewards for the validators and delegators bounties are calculated one hour to the epoch, then they will be made available for withdrawal to them, provided that a node has been registered within the node registration window. The withdrawal will be accessible via distributor contract in the Ethereum mainnet. Validators will have access to their and receive their earned reward through WithdrawFee, while Delegators will make use of withrawBounty to withdraw their earned bounties.
CONSENSUS
When you are building your consensus algorithm, it is very important to have plan for anything that can harmful within the network, some of these are malicious firewalls, DDos attack and so on. All these can interfere with the network messaging system, in response to this, the SKALE network uses a Moustefaoi et al consensus, this provide a number of highly desirable properties for a truly decentralized and highly throughput network. This protocol gives birth to the following networks.
- Leaderless: This method is used order to prevent collision or misunderstanding among the network participant, so this gives all virtualized nodes participants have equal chance to propose a block in the chain.
- Asynchronous: There are no bound placed upon the duration for a message to get delivered in an asynchronous timing model, the SKALE network makes use of this network in order to accurately captured the current state of the internet functionality, where nodes can fail and messages can be drop at any time.
- Byzantine Fault Tolerant: BZT is a security standard system, The BZT will ensure that the node in the network can always have an agreement on the same consensus, all in the presence of nodes. BZT has various implementations, but ABFT is one of the strongest of them, this account for possibilities of messages between local participant being delayed or not delivered to the recipient, this case is not so common.
- Threshold Signatures: This service is used for supermajority voting, BLS and DKG are used, in this case, there will be two private keys for the each virtualized node, they all have a verifiable key which is made available on the SKALE network for verification purpose.
SKALE EXTENSIONS
With the way this network was built, a number of extensions can be easily added to it, this will enhance greater functionality and give room for additional benefit to the network, as at now, we have two (2) extensions on SKALE network, which are: Storage & Interchain communication
- Storage: This gives the network ability to have a large file storage capability, this will allow more file to be included in each block and gives each block a direct access to each node’s file system from a file storage precompiled smart contract
- Interchain Communication: This is a process which was facilitated with a series of smart contracts on the Ethereum mainnet, all the Elastic sidechain and the agents will be able to run on each others chain, virtualized subnode is responsible for interchain messages.
SECTION THREE: SKALE MAINNET
The network’s mainnet consists of three phases, and with phase one (1) launched in June 2020, we are looking forward to Phase 2 (two) and Phase 3 (three)
PHASE 2
The Phase two of the mainnet will launch following Consensys Activate launch, whereas public allocations tokens are to be distributed following the activation and this will go through for 3 days Dutch Auction, Early supporters will receive their tokens allocation during this phase. The network will run in a delegate state with no token liquidity, The team will announced the launch date for the phase two mainnet .
This phase went live on October 1st, over $80 million USD in total value was locked , a global cohort of around 4000 people from 90 different countries secure 135 SKALE network nodes across 46 validators operator by staking their token.
WHY CONSENSYS ACTIVATE?
The N.O.D.E foundation selected ConsenSys Activate platform for the launch program because of their approach to legal and regulatory vagueness around utility token offering that decentralized projects face. ConsenSys Activate platform will provide a token sale, staking and delegation function for fair distribution token launches.
PHASE 3
Following a 90-days proof-of-use period, the network will allow users to have access to the unlocked tokens. Then users will be able to exchange and transfer their token, It will be open to Validators, Developers and all.
SECTION FOUR: SKALE TOKEN (SKL)
The SKALE Token is created in an hybrid way i.e. It is a cross-breed token, It is an ERC TOKEN
It serves a lot of purposes including giving the right to work in the network as a
· Validator: They stake SKL to the network and this gives them the right to run nodes and earn fees and token inflation.
· Staking as a Delegator: They will stake their token to validators and earn reward in return
· And also access to its resources by deploying and renting an elastic blockchain or sidechain.
MAIN FUNCTIONS OF SKL TOKEN
· Security of staking in the network: The delegators which is also known as the SKL holders will be able to stake their token to the validators, the Validators are the one who carry out the operations in the network by validating blocks and executing the smart contracts, they are rewarded with SKL token.
· Payment method for SKALE chain subscription fee: DappsDevelopers will be able to subscribe to the network with SKL Token, this depends on the resources the dapps needed. Rewards for Validators and Delegators are staking, both of them will be able to get their monthly reward based on the fees generated from developers.
· Governance & Voting: There will be an on-chain voting on SKALE network, and this is introduced with the aim of controlling the analysis of economic performance on SKALE network, Therefore, SKL token will be used for the voting process.
TOKEN PROFILE
Ticker: SKL
Ticker type: ERC777
Max supply: 7,000,000,000 tokens
Network launch: 4,140,000,000 tokens
ICO Token Price: 1 SKL = 0.03 USD
Fundraising Goal: $4,375,000
SKL Token is currently listed on four(4) exchanges namely Binance, Crypto.com, HUOBi and Uniswap
SKL token contracts
https://etherscan.io/token/0x00c83aecc790e8a4453e5dd3b0b4b3680501a7a7
SKL-Eth on Uniswap
https://info.uniswap.org/pair/0xf232d640a5700724748464ba8bd8bed21db609a6
Coinmarket cap
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/skale-network/
Coingecko
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/skale
SKL TOKEN SALE
The final number of approved participant in the SKL token sale was 4533 with about $53,300,00 intent purchase, This is times 10 (x10) more than the available token, so on Friday September 11th, 2020, The SKALE Ethereum network was powered by the SKL token sale was finally concluded, 167,139,884 SKL was purchased by 3,736 people from 90 different countries and the SKL token was purchased at the rate of $0.03 USD/SKL. This create an extensive network of participants around the globe for SKALE network and also it increases the network security.
SKL LAUNCH DETAILS
The project was able to raise a $17.1 million from private investors, this include a $10 million contribution from SKALE labs, SKALE used the $9.65 million which was raised from their previous SAFT sales as part of their contribution, the combination of these sales was able to purchase 54% of SKL initial supply and all these were subjected to investor lockup periods which range from 6 to 36 months based on SAFT agreement . 15% of the total supply was allocated to the N.O.D.E foundation in order to support the future development of SKALE network and the token will vest for a period of 7 years after SKALE’s mainnet launch. The remaining 31% of the initial supply was dedicated to the team, the team token will vest over for three years.
SECTION FIVE: SKALE’S TEAMS & PARTNERS
SKALE’S TEAM
The aim of SKALE network is to bring great speed and good configuration to blockchain.
It is also an open source web3 platform. This network is a project of a Lichtenstein based foundation (N.O.D.E. Foundation), but they partnered with SKALE Labs and some other top investor around the world, their aim is to support the development and efficiency of web3 technologies, this will give all the end users privilege to a user-friendly decentralized web interface, SKALE Labs deals with all the technology specs in this projects including coding and creating awareness for the project. SKALE Labs headquarter is located at San Francisco, California.
Founders
- Stan Kladko, Phd :- Co-Founder
- Jack O’Holleran:- Co-Founder
OTHER TEAM MEMBERS
SKALE PARTNERS
SKALE has over 40 partnership deals in its ecosystem, SKALE network is an open source network which Is designed to sidechain the Ethereum network. The network has over 40 integration partners and validators. In addition to this, the dapps that connect SKALE innovator program are currently building on the program.
Just after just one months after SKALE network launched its Mainnet, SKALE unveil a rich set of pre-packaged integrations with some major wallets, data storage solutions, validators, auth providers e.t.c. all these also came along with the community most used token standard support and developers tools used in the Ethereum community. All these makes SKALE network to build and run dapps with almost curve and also taking advantage of native community with connectivity to the Ethereum mainnet.
The affluent set of SKALE ecosystem partners is important not only to the development and breadth of technology in the Ethereum community, but also to a divided mission which is to hasten the end user adoption of decentralized solutions.
SKALE Network Validators
· Figment networks
· Blockdaemon
· Certus.One
· NGC (Neo Global Capital)
· Stakin
· Bison Trails (In development)
· Blockware
· Cypher Core
· StakeWithUs
· Ankr
· Dokia Capital
· Staked
· Hashed
· Chorus.One
· Chainflow
· ConsenSys Lab
· Hasquark
· Audit.One
· 01 Node
· Anonstake
· WolfEdge Capital
· Staking Facilities
SKALE Data/Explorers
· The Graph
· Covalent
· BitQuery
SKALE Decentralized Storage
This is aimed to expand SKALE’s native storage capabilities
· Arweave
· Guer
SKALE Oracles
· Chainlink
· Razor
SKALE Developer Tools
· Remix
· Web3js
· DappHero
· Truffle
SKALE Blockchain API Connectors
· Alethio
· Infura
SKALE Wallets & Auths
· Portis
· Torus
· Bitski
· Formatic
· Burner Wallet
SKALE Protocols
· Synthetix
· Maker
· Context
· Threefold
SKALE Dapps
There are over 50 Dapps currently building on SKALE
CONCLUSION
SKALE network is here to help decentralized applications (dapps) developer to speed up smart contract development and also give them overall increased performance, this network counteracts security with the help of a pooled validation model, this will leverage the security offered by a large number of validator nodes by combining node assignment with regular rotation of nodes among the sets
SKALE network is also an EVM compatible network, this will allow builders to makes us of existing Ethereum developer’s tools.
