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The SKALE Network announced today it has accepted over $17 million in a funding round that included investments from Arrington XRP Capital, Blockchange, ConsenSys Labs, Hashed, HashKey, Multicoin Capital, Recruit Holdings, and Winklevoss Capital.
The Ethereum-focused SKALE Network and SKALE Foundation were born in October 2018 after SKALE Labs announced it had raised $9.65 million, most in the form of a SAFT, to create them. In addition to Multicoin and Blockchange Ventures, several other crypto funds, including Aspect Ventures and Boost.VC, joined that initial funding round.
As its name somewhat implies, SKALE's goal is to help developers build dapps for the Ethereum network that can scale—enabling a lot more transactions per second without a lot more cost.
SKALE Labs co-founder and CEO Jack O'Holleran told Decrypt a large amount of the new funding will "go towards engineering efforts and building a strong development community." Just as importantly, much of it will be used to "seed the network with more capital, which in turn results in greater security and more nodes in the network."
According to O'Holleran, since SKALE uses proof of stake, the system Ethereum is slowly transitioning to, "more capital staked into the network means a greater cost of attack on each individual chain."
Joseph Lubin, ConsenSys founder and Ethereum co-founder, sees SKALE as a key part of Ethereum's move to proof of stake, calling it "a quantum leap in scalability for the Ethereum ecosystem." (Obligatory disclosure: ConsenSys also funds Decrypt.)
O'Holleran believes SKALE's "subsecond blocktimes, up to [2,000] TPS, and gasless transactions" will attract dapp developers from a range of sectors. He named gaming, DeFi, and sports betting as just a few areas that could benefit from an injection of speed.
SKALE Labs says 23 dapp developers have already signed up for the SKALE Innovator Program. After testing on the network, these early adopters hope to transition their dapps to SKALE's mainnet.