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Jack O’Holleran Of SKALE Labs - Bringing The Power Of Ethereum To Billions Of Users + Announcing: Edge Of AE - Building, Partnering And Investing In The Edge Of Web3
Many great tech ideas come out of necessity as opposed to great vision. This is what CEO and co-founder of SKALE Network, Jack O’Holleran, realized. Recognizing the blockchain scalability problem, Jack used his passion for decentralized systems to fuel his solution. Jack sits with Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger to share how their platform intends to advance the development of Web3 technologies and make them more accessible for developers and end-users alike. Listen in as Jack expounds on how the SKALE Network is a game-changer at bringing speed and configurability to the blockchain database. For today’s hot topics, find out about a new venture the Edge Of NFT crew has embarked on in partnership with a world-class development studio. Introducing: Edge Of AE Studios, your one stop shop for bringing the Edgiest Web3 projects to life. Let’s co-create!
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Jack O’Holleran Of SKALE Labs – Bringing The Power Of Ethereum To Billions Of Users + Announcing: Edge Of AE – Building, Partnering And Investing In The Edge Of Web3
This episode features Jack O’Holleran, Cofounder and CEO of SKALE Labs. SKALE Network is an open-source Web3 platform intended to bring speed and configurability to the blockchain. It’s the only containerized network capable of running an unlimited number of security, centralized, high-performance Ethereum blockchains.
Jack is a veteran Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur with a deep background in machine learning, AI technologies and blockchain. His resume includes being Cofounder of Aktana, Cofounder of IncentAlign and executive positions at Good Technology and Motorola. His first work with digital currencies was in 2008, building a digital currency platform for enterprise resource allocation.
Jack has been an active cryptocurrency investor and evangelist for decentralized systems since early 2013. In 2018, Jack’s passion for decentralized systems and blockchain led him to join efforts with Stan Kladko to solve the blockchain scalability problem and develop the Ethereum Layer 2 multichain network, SKALE. Jack, welcome to the show.
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jack, it’s great to have you here. I know this show has been a long time in the making. I appreciate that you’re also a fan of the show. It’s always an honor to have a fan of the show as a guest. Thankfully, we both recovered from the buffet corn cough at EatDenver, named affectionately after the buffet corn that we all minted. We’ll see you at NFTLA soon but in the meantime, let’s dive into what SKALE is all about and how it got started. We’d love to start with your genesis story. How did you get the idea to put the wheels in motion to build SKALE?
A lot of great tech ideas come out of necessity as opposed to great vision. Stan and I are both building Web3 applications. We had different ideas for building products that could bring the power of Web3 and decentralized systems to hundreds of millions of people through the applications we wanted to build. We both are running into the same roadblocks of, “This is too costly and too slow. How can we ever even get to 100,000 concurrent users, let alone millions or hundreds of millions?”
Stan is a world-renowned cryptographer and physicist. When I was introduced to Stan by a couple of VCs that were close with Signia and Floodgate ventures, Stan had these ideas. He wanted to build a decentralized Twitter, marketplace and DEX. He had these four ideas. I was like, “Stan, why do you think you can build these things?” He’s a technical visionary. He architected what SKALE is now. The two of us came together and said, “This is something we can bring to thousands of other builders as opposed to using it to build an application for ourselves.”
It’s beautiful to be on a team with someone like that. I love all the people that we meet here. Many forward-thinking folks have a clear vision of what’s going to happen next. I remember talking to the founder of RNDR Network and being like, “Woah.” He saw it all. It’s beautiful to be able to be in touch with people like that and be on a team with them.
I do have a burning follow-up question for Jack. As you’re going through this conception process, the gas prices of ETH and the impact of CyptoKitties on the market, did that cross your mind in the process of conceiving SKALE?
Yeah, definitely. One of SKALE’s biggest advantages is that it’s gasless. Stan and I both came from enterprise software, B2B software, machine learning, big data. This model of instead of paying per bite, you pay for a resource is a core part of B2B software. You also don’t want to penalize your growth by charging users each time they use your product.
With SKALE, a big piece of this was, “If we could subsidize the fees through SKALE token and let people essentially rent out the space in advance, it takes the burden of the transaction fee from the user to either a developer or DAO or a project or a company.” That’s one of the pieces of innovation. It wasn’t just slowed block times and limited functionality in these blockchain products but it was also high fees. You can’t do anything with $100 fees.
SKALE Labs: You don’t want to penalize your growth by charging users each time they use your product.
Can you tell us about Ruby.Exchange? How that is supported by your platform?
A lot of people have a vision in their minds of what a blockchain is. SKALE is a network of many blockchains. Instead of one, there could be hundreds or thousands of these blockchains. They all work together to share security but they don’t share performance. When you have all these chains that can talk to each other, you have this limitless blockchain pool of resources but you can have issues in terms of functionality and interoperability.
There’s a launch happening called SKALE V2. All of these changes in the SKALE Network will be able to speak to one another. When that happens, we also need to make sure that there’s not just liquidity everywhere. You don’t want to have every chain have a DEX. There’s a SKALE community hub launching. Ruby and some other folks are spearheading this SKALE community hub.
There’ll be a world-class marketplace for trading tokens, an AMM or Automated Market Maker on the Ruby.Exchange that also is powered by NFTs. There’ll be NFTs that people can purchase that give their user account increased rewards and other different features and functionalities. It is cool to see an NFT not only be a limited piece of art but something that’s functionally adding value through a smart contract system like a decentralized exchange.
When there are people who are wondering about the long-term feasibility of NFTs, they’re often folks that have this vision of collectible art, trading cards on the internet and things like that. We’re all seeing this over and over again. There are a lot of functional usages that are going to be wrapped into the infinite structure of the future here. There’s no denying that there’s no better way to do this stuff. You’re either going to be seeing NFTs or you’re not but they’ll be there.
That fits the culture of blockchain and crypto too. Imagine if NASDAQ had an NFT you could use to enhance trading fees. It’s like, “Sorry, it’s just not going to happen.” This whole decentralized, fun and disruptive nature of the industry also brings in cool pieces of functionality.
We think of community, it’s at the center of everything. Bringing users onboard and engaging with them, making things easy for them. This is the way that we’ve seen so many companies onboard folks into the space. I’m curious how you view ID cash’s position in that hierarchy of things that you do for customers.
ID cash is still one of the best-kept secrets in crypto especially NFTs. One of the issues has always been how do you help a novice user who doesn’t have a Web3 wallet get an NFT easily? A lot of people are trying to build solutions. ID lets a user scan a QR code. Instead of it sending them an email or taking them to a landing page, it mints an NFT on the SKALE blockchain and creates a wallet on their device that can leverage the Android wallet, Native iOS wallet and biometrics of the user. It safely stores and secures the NFT. It completely transforms distribution.
If you think about all the brands whether it be consumer brands, celebrities, musicians, premieres of movies and your ability to get NFTs to non-crypto native users. Part of it is its amazing engineering on behalf of the ID team but also, they were able to use the gasless nature of SKALE to mint the NFT. Everywhere else, you need to subsidize that user’s transaction. Frankly, it isn’t feasible to do it in a seamless manner.
That easy button across the board, I feel like you can provide that to solve a complicated problem. In this case, we’ve all spent hours explaining how to open a wallet and how to transfer the money endlessly. That’s an amazing addition.
By the way, I feel like that should be an industry motto. We should be like, “How can we easy-button this thing?” That’s the gating factor, like, “Finally, the tech’s here, the social side. The users are here. We’ve got to easy-button these products.”
We could probably do a show on each of these products but we want to go through some of the other ones so people can understand the vastness of what SKALE is doing. One of those is Curate, which is an NFT marketplace that uses SKALE to empower creators by giving them gas minting and fast finality. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
We’ve got a couple of cool launch partners in what we’re calling SKALE NFT Hubs. If you think about it, there’ll be hundreds and eventually thousands of games, applications, decentralized social media products, B2B marketplaces and all these different products on the SKALE Network. A lot of these products have NFTs but you can’t have an NFT marketplace on every single chain so we have these hubs.
Curate is taking a mobile-friendly, mobile-first approach to NFT sales and NFT marketplace and attacking a high-quality creator market. They’re seeing, “OpenSea is our vast store of unlimited quantities.” They’re trying to be more specific to a certain clientele of buyers. That will be an NFT hub. NFTrade is another big SKALE partner that will be launching a hub we’re excited about.
I know you guys have NFTrade and Solidaria. Solidaria is interesting, empowering the Shopify storefront with a reward mechanism to send customers tokens and NFTs. That’s where a lot of people go when they think about, “How can we make this stuff mainstream?” They think Web3, Shopify. If we put those two things together then we’ve got something special. Can you tell us about both of those, NFTrade and Solidaria?
They’re servicing different audiences, which I love because the industry is growing fast and it’s growing in every direction. For people reading, one interesting data point on the market is our team can’t hire enough people and business development and we don’t have enough time in the day. There are so many projects being built. There are so many cool things happening. Every type of business that needs to have better customer engagement, brand engagement and community growth is thinking about how to launch an NFT.
If you look at that, NFTrade is OpenSea meets a full multichain world. They have changed support from a number of top marketplaces. Depending on the day, they’re always in the top 3 to 5 in volume on each specific pure marketplace. They’re a brilliant team out of Israel that has built this product. We’re pumped about the launch. They’ll have a dedicated SKALE hub.
There are 150 different projects getting ready to go live on SKALE at different stages of the process to go on the V2. A lot of those will go live on NFTrade. The Web3 pure side of me loves being Web3 but also the practical side of me knows that connecting to Web2 and having hybrid models is the way we’re going to get the first hundreds of millions of users. If you go to dApp radar and you sort by daily active users, you don’t see hundreds of millions of users at all. That will change when we get good Web3 hooks into Web2 products like Shopify. The Solidaria team is doing just that.
We’ve got a lot of ground to cover still and I feel like we’ve gone a long way. It’s amazing what you’re doing here. One of the things that you also announced was the $100 million ecosystem fund. What’s the story there? What are you planning to do with it? How are you going to be deploying this in the ecosystem?
We’re incredibly excited about it. We’ve been waiting for a long time to announce this. It was strategic and it would be announced right before SKALE V2. We have almost all these islands. All these SKALE chains can talk only to the Mainnet. There are islands with a single bridge and there are soon about to be islands that are all connected to one another. You almost have more of a Venice series of canals and connected buildings instead of islands.
SKALE Labs: It’s cool to see an NFT not only be a limited piece of art but something that’s functionally adding value through a smart contract system or a decentralized exchange.
With that launch, we’ve announced this $100 million grant program. That will be given out in different waves. We want to be decentralized and get a lot of different entities supporting that distribution. The first one will be supported by the foundation behind SKALE and it will be specific to blockchain gaming. There’s a $5 million grant pool that’s dedicated to that. In the future, there’ll be different DAOs that will take different initiatives to launch a DeFi-specific grant program or a Web2 conversion program. We look forward to seeing a lot of different groups, parties, people and individuals help deploy that capital.
Big opportunity to have an influence in this space. We’ve seen so many programs like that evolve and make such a huge impact, getting especially small companies to help set them on a trajectory for success so kudos. That’s amazing.
One interesting thing there is we had the opportunity to take that quantity of tokens and say, “Let’s go sell it to VCs and let’s go raise $100 million.” We would have $100 million and then we could hire all these people then we’d have a big centralized company. Instead, we took an approach saying, “SKALE is community-owned. It’s a public good. Instead of selling that to VCs who then are going to sell it later, how could we strategically distribute that to grow a community and create more shared ownership of the protocol?” We did have a funding opportunity to go do that and turn it down.
This is one of the things I love so much about this phase of the evolution of crypto. There’s the ethos, which we can talk about all day but actions speak so much louder than words. That’s what we’re seeing here so kudos. Awesome.
Thank you.
There are so many creative ways to do this. You think about what was done in the 2017 and 2018 time and some of the criticisms of that time in terms of making VCs do well. Thankfully for them, they’ve helped build this ecosystem but we now know what real long-term mass adoption takes. It takes an army. On that note, tell us a little bit more about 360NFT and what we can expect from their collaboration with SKALE.
360NFT is one of the sleepers that did a soft launch in getting products dialed in but they service what I would call an entirely underrepresented component of humanity. They’re going initially into the reggaeton and Latin-American music scene and going after a market that is representative of the founders. It’s a diverse team. They are going and saying, “We know tech, music and distribution. Let’s go take this to people that look like us that we understand.” That market is being frankly underserved and we’re pumped to support them. They’re a brilliant team that a lot of people are going to be talking about soon.
In any endeavor with such a wide net, it’s so important to have individuals and collective spearheading a focus that is around their culture or their specific area of knowledge. We’re seeing all sorts of interesting things bubble up and it’s beautiful. People need to remember that there’s no one culture behind the evolution of Web3. It’s going to take these individuals building within their individual cultures and bringing it all together to make something fresh and new. We’ve been talking here for a bit. My brain is mush, which I love about this show. You have so much going on with SKALE and it’s so impressive to hear all about it. It’s fun. I love this stuff. Tell me about the Mempo NFT collection. What’s that?
Mempo is a SKALE partner. They’re building something called the Mempoverse. It’s GameFi. There is an NFT they’ve launched and they’ll be launching more later directly on the SKALE Network. They’re pumped about being able to have zero-cost GameFi play-to-earn games built by world-class developers. Also, being able to integrate avatars, NFTs and NFT-oriented superpowers that can be coded into smart contracts. They’re doing some cool stuff. It’s starting with an NFT but working on building what is called next-generation play-to-earn platform.
Can you tell me more about a dual reality community and what that means inside of Mempo?
It’s interesting that you can interface with the Mempo community through different houses, homes and real-world experiences. Take the Super Bowl, for example. You could go to a Mempo house and a Mempo party as a token NFT holder. You also can interface in a metaverse with your avatar, play and earn, trade.
We’re seeing this remote reality with a lot of partners. There’s some cool stuff that hasn’t been announced yet where people can live and play games or participate in a sporting event and the fans are calling plays. They’re getting certain rights and power to call those plays by having NFTs. There’s a lot of cool stuff that’s coming. We’re blending the real world and the digital world well.
We haven’t heard about remote fans calling plays at all or had them on our show with Steve Aoki but that sounds cool.
There it is, part of the Fan Controlled Football. Let’s take a step back a little bit and ask, for 2022, how do you think about the interactions of the metaverse and the NFT economy? Where do you see that going?
I feel like we’re crawling. We’re not even walking and we’re not running yet. That’s exciting because there’s so much happening. To say that this is the first inning of nine innings, it’s fair. What I’m seeing when I’m talking about brands and different global platforms is everyone’s thinking it’s like NFT PLUS. You have an art image that’s rare, immutable, provable on-chain and scarce to a certain degree but that also gives you something.
It could give you access to a special component of a wine club, could make you a co-producer of a movie series that gets sold to HBO or make you have certain access to backstage passes of a concert if you hold one of those images. It’s a piece of art that gives you that pass to different experiences or with Ruby, enhance trading features.
It’s the most rapid development I’ve seen in any industry. It’s crazy how fast things are evolving here and also how fast real value is being created. We’re not just talking about notional values anymore. There’s real revenue coming in, dollars being distributed, value being created for users. It’s an insane pace.
The NFTLA conference will probably be the best opportunity for anybody to witness this. It’s a culmination of the skills that are the perfect recipe for growth. We’ve got marketers, creatives, technologists, finance people, media and entertainment. In the same room, you can have a world-famous producer, a smart contract developer, a brand agency and an economist. They all need each other.
Let’s do it.
Is that the first dog-related purchase?
Everyone wants a little dose of that.
Hopefully to the same place.
If you go to Skale.Network, it’s a good central hub to find Twitter, which is @SkaleNetwork and me on Twitter is @JackOHolleran. It’s a strong community. If people are interested, please come check it out. We’ve got a huge global ambassador group. We’ve got sixteen different languages represented and all the content coming through and strong communities across the world.
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Yeah.
That’d be great to hear about.
I’ve got three big projects where we need you.
Safe travels.
Thanks for hopping on.
Thank you.
That is what I would be.
Thanks so much. I’ll talk to you soon.
Important Links
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RNDR Network – past episode
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Steve Aoki – past episode
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@SkaleNetwork – Twitter
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@JackOHolleran – Twitter
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iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
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Spotify – Edge of NFT Podcast
About Jack O’Holleran
Jack’s passion for decentralized systems and blockchain led him to join efforts with Stan to solve the blockchain scalability problem. He is a veteran Silicon Valley Technology entrepreneur with a deep background in machine learning/AI technologies, and blockchain.
His resume includes co-founder of Aktana, co-founder IncentAlign, and executive positions at Good Technology, and Motorola. His first work with Digital Currencies was in 2008 building a digital currency platform for Enterprise Resource Allocation. He has been an active Cryptocurrency investor and an evangelist for decentralized systems since early 2013.