Robert has reported for a variety of international publications including the Associated Press, The Guardian, Vice, and Decrypt. Current areas of interest include the political economy of technology, cryptocurrencies, and privacy. Robert has a Bachelor of Science from UCL, and a Master's degree from the University of Oxford's Internet Institute.
What is SKALE (SKL)?
SKALE (SKL) is the native currency of the SKALE Network, a sidechain network that connects to Ethereum but runs independently, cutting down on fees while speeding up transactions.
The project was launched in 2018 by co-founders Stan Kladko and Jack O’Holleran, who went on to launch the SKL token in 2020. They wanted to address some common complaints with Ethereum (the largest smart contract-supporting blockchain): it’s too slow to service its huge community, transactions are expensive, and block space is scarce. By working alongside Ethereum, SKALE can process many more transactions, much faster, before officially recording them in the Ethereum blockchain.
SKALE is far from the only project trying to help Ethereum scale. Although they use wildly different methods, Polygon, Arbitrum, Loopring, and Optimism also try to make things faster and cheaper for Ethereum users.
What can you do with SKALE?
SKL is a utility token that blockchain developers can spend to deploy their applications on SKALE’s network of independent, Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchains, and rent SKALE’s blockchain resources.
You can also stake SKL to secure the network. This means you lock up your SKL tokens as collateral and allow them to be used to validate transactions. SKALE is a proof-of-stake blockchain, meaning that the network randomly selects stakers to confirm other people’s transactions. Broadly, the more tokens you stake, the more SKL tokens you’ll receive as a reward for validating transactions on the network.
SKL also functions as a governance token. This means you can use it for “on-chain” votes that determine the rules of the SKALE Network.
How can you buy SKALE?
You can buy SKL on a brokerage like Wealthsimple (👋), a cryptocurrency exchange platform, or a decentralized exchange.
While brokerages like Wealthsimple Crypto buy SKL from elsewhere and provide them to clients, cryptocurrency exchanges let you buy SKL directly from other users through peer-to-peer matching engines. Exchanges are usually a little cheaper than brokerages, but lots of the big ones don’t operate in parts of Canada. Decentralized exchanges go a step further than exchanges, selling you crypto directly within a blockchain protocol. They’re often more expensive, since you have to pay for the price of a blockchain transaction.
Last Updated May 31, 2022
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