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Jack O'Holleran Of SKALE — The Platform That Allows You To Create Invisible Web3 Experiences, Plus: Shira Lazar Of The JOMO Effect
SKALE is a groundbreaking blockchain network capable of supporting an unlimited number of swift on-demand pooled security blockchains, all while ensuring zero gas fees for end users. It is currently the only blockchain netwo$rk capable of doing so, and the use cases that we have seen so far are astounding. In this episode, CEO and co-founder Jack O’Holleran returns on the Edge of NFT podcast to discuss how SKALE Network is scaling Ethereum with a lightning-fast gas free second layer solution. Plus, we are joined by Shira Lazar to talk about the JOMO Effect, an innovative platform that helps Web3 citizens find peace and happiness while still pursuing their most ambitious best selves. And learn how Sotheby’s is making both an offensive and defensive platform play that also empowers creators.
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Jack O’Holleran Of SKALE — The Platform That AllowsYou To Create Invisible Web3 Experiences, Plus: Shira Lazar Of The JOMO Effect
This is Jack O’Holleran of SKALE, a unique blockchain network that can support an unlimited number of rapid on-demand pooled security blockchains without any gas fees for end users.
Stay tuned for this episode and learn how SKALE Network is scaling Ethereum with a lightning-fast gas-free second-layer solution.
Explore the JOMO Effect, finding peace and happiness while still pursuing your most ambitious best self.
Learn how Sotheby’s is making both an offensive and defensive platform play that also empowers creators. Finally, Outer Edge of LA, our awesome community-centric gathering, returned to LA in March 2023. If you think you missed out, you can catch up on all of the interactive experiences, discussions, presentations, and more by heading over to Watch.OuterEdge.live and sign up with your email address to get a full recap of over 60 captivating conversations and performances.
In this sponsored episode, we are honored to have Jack O’Holleran back on the show. The CEO and Cofounder of SKALE. It is a groundbreaking blockchain network capable of supporting an unlimited number of swift on-demand pooled security blockchains, all while ensuring zero gas fees for end users. Jack is a seasoned tech entrepreneur from Silicon Valley with an impressive background in machine learning, AI, and blockchain.
He cofounded IncentAlign, which is now Aktana, and held executive roles at Good Technology and Motorola. He has been involved with digital currencies since 2008 when he played a key role in developing a digital currency platform for enterprise resource allocation. SKALE represents a network of interconnected blockchains designed to deliver speed, decentralization, and security to a wide range of user-friendly Web3 applications. Developers can easily deploy their own interoperable EVM blockchains without compromising security or decentralization. It is an open-source community-owned project. Jack O’Holleran, welcome back to the show. It is great to see you.
It is great to see you. I’m excited to be here. We are going to have some fun.
It has been like a minute since Outer Edge LA when you are hanging out talking about the future of the macro gaming economy, and here we are now. I’m sure you have been in 5 or 6 countries since then.
I have been in a few. I have been to Japan and Portugal. That was an awesome event. Props to your whole team and everybody that came together. If you are tuning in and you weren’t there, I highly recommend you go in 2024. In terms of the quality of the conversations I had, it was the best event I have been to in a long time. Great work, and we had a blast. I met a lot of great people.
If you are tuning in and weren’t there, you can go to Watch.OuterEdge.live to catch the recorded content, but you will probably miss some of those conversations Jack got into while being there.
This is a perfect teaser for the next segment. The goal here is for you not to have FOMO as you are tuning in to this but to have JOMO. We will talk more about that later on in the show. What I enjoyed most was the hackathon that we did together, Jack. We had 21 teams and over 100 developers and builders, half of which were women, deploying some cool technology and showing what the LA ecosystem is all about. We had some folks come in from all over the world. That was a lot of fun. Thanks for helping with that.
It was a good mix. You got to get the builders involved, especially at an NFT-focused conference where there are a lot of creative people, agencies, designers, and artists. It was great to see also the developers and engineers well represented.
We are at the outer edge of all emerging tech at this point. That is why our partnership is quite special because you guys are putting together a world-class experience, not just for NFT platforms but games and other Web3 applications. We’ve had you on before. Our audience can tune in for a deeper dive into what SKALE is. For this episode, can you give us a quick elevator pitch and more importantly, talk about the direction you are taking SKALE?
I’m going to take a step back and try to hit this from a high level so it is understandable. A lot of times, people talk about blockchains. Maybe 2% of the people know what the person is talking about. Most people are familiar with Ethereum. SKALE was purpose-built to help Ethereum scale. We were one of the original Layer 2 before Layer 2 was a term. That term has morphed over time, but we were app builders.
Stan Kladko, myself, and my cofounder had 3 or 4 different ideas of applications that we wanted to build on Ethereum. We kept running into the same issue like cost, speed, latency, and all these issues that made it impossible to create highly scalable applications. Stan, my cofounder, is a world-renowned physicist and cryptographer. I designed a scaling infrastructure for the applications he was looking at building. We decided to take that idea and bring that to other builders like ourselves. Both of our backgrounds are more in middleware and infrastructure as opposed to on the application layer. It was a better fit for us.
SKALE was built to bring the power of Ethereum to billions of users, not tens of thousands of users. It is built to work in tandem with Ethereum. It has Layer 1 and Layer 2 security qualities. At the end of the day, many Ethereum blockchains are connected to Ethereum and integrated with Ethereum. That enables people to build and launch NFTs on Ethereum, run games and applications adjacent to the SKALE network, and launch NFTs on SKALE. That is it in the simplest form. It is designed to help users use blockchain applications without the complexity and in a way that is more we are used to within the Web2 world.
Ethereum gas prices were sky high in the $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 to $5,000. Since the merge, they have come down considerably. I was doing some trading and some exchanging. Ethereum was popping back up to the $30, $40 to $50 range again. It is important to understand products like SKALE allow for much more efficient sustainable transactions.
A famous chef in Napa called me. He is a SKALE holder. He is trying to restake rewards. I was walking him through this. I was walking to the office. I’m jumping on a call and doing some tech support for high-value community members. The gas fee was $265 for him to claim the staking reward and then re-stake it. A few weeks ago, I did the same thing and it was $10. It is good news. Whenever Ethereum gas fees are high, it means a lot of people are using Ethereum. You get a lot of market sentiment. It is a leading indicator of market activity when those gas fees go up. It also makes platforms like SKALE more useful when it is not $5, and the same $5 and $10 transaction is $265. It makes a lot more sense why you are using Layer 2 or Ethereum scaling platforms.
I’m looking up Stan. He has impressive background here. Directors’ Fellow, Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory for 25 years. He has seen a lot of cutting-edge technology in that particular role.
Stan got some crazy stories about Los Alamos. There is this protected area that is defended by machine gun turrets. He couldn’t even access it. He was like, “There is some stuff going on. There are some smart people living in the desert doing things under highly secure environments.” Stan also has a funny story. When he was in high school, he won the math competition for the entire USSR. He grew up in Ukraine. He was the top math student.
He ended up winning a scholarship to go study abroad for one year in Maine. He said he only had $50 when he moved to Maine. He was a dishwasher. He wash dishes, and then he would do this advanced theoretical math. That was his introduction to America. Eventually, he moved here. He was a researcher at Stanford and accomplished a lot of cool things at Silicon Valley.
Was he from Russia?
He is from Ukraine back when it was part of the USSR. He won this USSR Soviet Union math competition.
You got an impressive variety of use cases there with SKALE. There are experiences that are engaging games to get to large-scale frictionless Web3 integrations. Can you tell us a little bit more about those applications you are facilitating and why SKALE is the special infrastructure for that?
Let’s look at the NFT market in general. Even the NFT LA rebranding to Outer Edge LA is probably a sign of this. The NFT market is not just about trading collectibles. NFTs are going to utilize this entire spectrum of technical applications. NFTs are going to be interacting with generative AI with applications in gaming, Web3 social media applications, creator economy, gating, and ticketing. There is this whole field where having nonfungible tokens is highly valuable in all these areas of practice.
If you think about SKALE and you think about this as a product market-fitting strategy, you think, “Why does SKALE add value to a developer?” The developer can have zero gas fee transactions for the end user. Dartmouth Blockchain did a study and they analyzed the top blockchains out there. SKALE, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, and Near. SKALE was the fastest. It is faster than Solana. It had a faster time to finality than Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, and the other chains I mentioned, which was amazing to see. If you look at that, you say, “How do you utilize the zero gas fees and those strengths of speed and time to finality?” The answer is in utility, not just in the collection.
SKALE: How do you utilize the zero gas fees and those strengths of speed and time to finality? The answer is in utility, not just in collection.
We’re seeing a lot of success where NFTs are utilized in applications and this broad spectrum of technologies. If we talk to a developer who says, “I’m launching a 10,000 NFT set. It is going to live on Ethereum. The only activity of transactions will be people trading it with each other.” If somebody is selling an expensive NFT, they don’t care about $10 or a $50 gas fee. Somebody who is using NFT hundreds or thousands of times in a day cares if they have to spend $5 or $10 a time or even $0.10 a time. That is where we are finding our sweet spot. Anybody who has been watching the blog has probably seen a lot of these announcements of different applications joining SKALE.
If you look at what Richard from Manifold is all about, he envisions a world of NFTs where it is equivalent to buying a cup of coffee. If a little coffee spills out of the mug, you don’t cry. You buy another coffee. The idea of easy and seamless transactions for small goods and services, especially in music with Sound.xyz, it is critical that those transaction costs are low to create a liquid and vibrant ecosystem. Ideally, we get to under the same cost as credit card purchasing transaction fees. That would be a win if we can seal that deal. Jack, you can use that tagline if you want for SKALE in the future. That seems quite relevant to what you are up to.
That springs up an interesting conversation I had where we were talking to someone who was enabling a credit card fee out ramp. We were comparing that. There is a little user friction if I take my credit card and I’m going to buy an NFT and start doing events and convert a bunch of instantly credit card dollars into USDC, for example. We then start talking through it. The partner said, “There is a huge percentage fee. We are going to pay multiple percentage points to do that, and a gas feed to bridge over or a direct ramp fee is a dramatically better solution.”
There are some ramps going live on SKALE. The wire ramp is live. There are other ones going live. We have exceeded credit cards already, but we still need to get that user friction down because credit cards are easy. It is what it comes down to. Across the industry, there are a lot of huge strides being made there.
Recognizing how closely you guys align with Ethereum, where do you see the future of Ethereum scaling and its potential in tandem with SKALE supporting some of these faster and more frequent transactions?
I’m excited about SKALE Connect. It is something we are going to talk about. I don’t want to jump the gun, but that is an interesting use case. If you think about the value of Ethereum, you can’t use SKALE without Ethereum because all the staking for SKALE lives on Ethereum. The SKALE token lives on Ethereum. That secures the SKALE network. Staking rewards are all paid out on Ethereum.
The networks are intertwined. From a usability perspective, they are intertwined for an end user. One interesting area that we are excited about launching, and you will be hearing more about this, is something called SKALE Connect. Any NFT on the Ethereum Mainnet can be utilized instantly within the SKALE network as soon as SKALE Connect is turned off.
What happens is there is an oracle that natively lives on every SKALE chain. It is because of the component parts of how SKALE functions. There is a trusted execution environment which is an Intel SGX chip. There is a threshold messaging feature. There is messaging where the different nodes can talk, interact quickly, and sign off. There is a consensus mechanism. These things together are the component parts of an oracle if you look at Chainlink and other oracles. Those component parts are already in each SKALE chain.
We realize, “Let’s turn the skill oracle on.” It was not a lot of coding for the community to get that together. The skill oracle existed. Its goal initially was to provide standard oracle value in terms of reading data inputs like, “What is the price of a token for the DeFi platform? What is the sports score? What is the weather?” Things that oracles do.
One other use case is that the oracle could look at the Ethereum Mainnet and validate which address own has which token at any given time. Let’s say, Josh, you have your APE. You decide this game developer has enabled APEs to live over on the SKALE chain. The APE user knows he doesn’t need to lock that in any contract, put it in any risky environment, part ways with it, or lock it up at all.
By owning it in an on-chain manner that can be validated, that user can have special access to whether it be in a game, mint other NFTs, utilize that character, or have special roles and access within that game, all in an on-chain seamless gas-free manner without any risk to NFTs on the Ethereum maintenance. That relationship is exciting.
I want to drill into that a little bit. There have been conversations around interoperability in terms of teleporting assets. In this case, what you are saying is you don’t have to teleport your assets. You can keep them right where they are and be in two places at once.
Yes, exactly. If someone comes up with a name for that, tell me.
Being in two places at once is called bilocation. If that is what is happening, that is bilocation.
That could be great. The thing is you can bridge NFTs on SKALE. You could take your APE and lock it in an escrow contract. What happens is it bridges over through threshold encrypted messaging. The SKALE chain validates that you have that. It gets brought over. The custody could change. You could sell it to somebody on SKALE. Somebody else could have it, come over, and be able to claim that. What you are doing is putting your NFT at risk. If you have a $1 million NFT or whatever valuable NFT and you don’t want to do that, you can utilize it without any risk or cost. The main thing is for developers to leverage and utilize this.
We are excited. I can’t announce them yet because of NDAs, but our partners will be announcing them, where cool use cases of Ethereum Mainnet NFTs are being utilized over on SKALE. New NFTs can be minted within the gameplay and assets. New privileges can be garnered by the carriers or the holder of the NFT. Let’s say Josh passes it to Eathan. The oracle will recognize that. If Josh goes over to try to use the NFT, he no longer can. The new owner can validate it. He can go over and utilize it because your 0x address on the Ethereum Mainnet is the same 0x address on SKALE for a contract. Smart contracts are different, but for addresses, only that user can claim that on the other EVM chain.
Let’s say I buy something on Ethereum and it is now affiliated. If I go to Etherscan, my address says that my address owns that item. If I sell it to someone through SKALE, does Ethereum still say it is affiliated with my address, but it is inaccessible to me?
That is a great question because it calls out some of the complexities. It gives me an opportunity to clarify. Let’s say you have 0x896B. You own a Pudgy Penguin. We are not working with Pudgy Penguins. I’m using them as an example because they got these adorable penguins. You can go over to SKALE. Your 0x address over here is the same one on SKALE. You don’t need to pass your Penguin. You don’t have to do anything. The SKALE chain knows, “This address has a Penguin over on the Mainnet.” It can validate that in an on-chain manner without any centralized trust mechanisms.
If the Penguins had a game or licensed their IP to a game on SKALE, without any custodial risk or security risk to the user on the Ethereum mainnet, that user could be utilizing that asset on the SKALE chain without any transfer. Let’s say you sent it to another 0x address. That 0x address would be the only address that could have those rights for this. You got this similar version walking around on the SKALE side that can be transferred because it is mirroring. It is almost like a mirrored NFT. Maybe that is a better way to put it.
You mentioned a little bit about the gaming implications here, which is useful. Anything else to say about opening up these possibilities in gaming? Do we cover the use case there?
Another interesting use case is gating or ticketing NFTs. There are a lot of high-value social access NFTs being sold. You have this NFT. You might get access to do A, B, C, or certain things. A lot of those things you can do and privileges are off-chain. They are people that are running a business. They have an AWS server that validates that this user’s email address is the same user back in the access, and they get these privileges because they have the NFT.
There are also unchain mechanics and values where people want to run applications for gated NFTs, but when they do that, the user has to have a native currency. The user is paying gas fees, and things are slow and cumbersome. On SKALE, you can have this Web2-like experience where you can utilize on-chain mechanics for social NFTs and gating NFTs. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a game. It is also the other use cases, whether it is B2B, social media, greater economy, or music. You can open up smart contract execution on the SKALE side without any custodial risk or security risk.
I’m interested. Let’s cover that.
Even $5 or $10 is still too high.
Is it a marathon or an Ironman?
Let’s hit one if that works for you, Jack.
Let’s do it.
Important Links
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Consensus - Past Episode / Apple Podcast
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Jordana Reim - LinkedIn
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@PeaceInsideLive - Twitter
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@ShiraLazar - Instagram
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@JackOHolleran - Twitter
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Spotify - Edge Of NFT
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iTunes - Edge Of NFT
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EdgeOfNFT - Twitter