What is SKALE?

The SKALE Network is a high-throughput, low-latency, configurable byzantine fault tolerant, elastic blockchain network built interoperably with Ethereum.

The initial and primary use case for this network will be in form of elastic sidechains for the Ethereum Blockchain. In this context it can be described as an ‘Elastic Sidechain Network’.

Sidechains in the network are operated by a group of virtualized subnodes selected from a subset of nodes in the network and are run on all or a subset (multitenancy) of each node’s computation and storage resources.

Each sidechain is highly configurable, with consumers being able to choose their chain’s size, consensus protocol, virtual machine, parent blockchain, and additional security measures (e.g. virtualized subnode shuffling frequency).

The SKALE token is a work and usage token. To have the right to work in the network, nodes must run the SKALE daemon and stake a predetermined amount of SKALE tokens on the Ethereum mainnet via a series of smart contracts known as the SKALE Manager.

Once a node has been admitted to the network, 24 peer nodes will be randomly selected to audit its uptime and latency - these metrics will be submitted regularly to the 1 SKALE Manager and will affect a node’s rewards for participating in the network. When creating an Elastic Sidechain, consumers will specify their desired chain configuration and submit payment for the duration that they would like to rent network resources to run the chain.

If the network has enough bandwidth, nodes meeting computation and storage requirements specified in the chain’s configuration will be randomly assigned to participate as its virtualized subnodes.

EVM-compatibility within Elastic Sidechains allows consumers to deploy existing Ethereum-based smart contracts directly to them while an increased gas limit lifts the computation and storage limitations of the Ethereum mainnet EVM.

This allows for much more use cases for smart contracts that were previously impossible to run in a cost-effective or performant manner. As an example, each Elastic Sidechain deploys with a FileStorage smart contract that allows for the ability to store large files (up to 100MB) on nodes in the network - something which would necessitate the filling of ~10,000 blocks to do on the Ethereum mainnet.

Each Elastic Sidechain also supports BLS signatures in its consensus model - allowing for interchain messaging. Virtualized subnodes on each chain are able to validate that a transaction was signed and committed by virtualized subnodes on another chain through the use of that chain’s group signature, which is made available to all other chains on the Ethereum mainnet.

Such an extension of Elastic Sidechains supports the microservice model where each chain is able to perform a specific operation and feed their outputs as inputs to other Elastic Sidechains.

As each node in the network continues to participate in their assigned Elastic Sidechains, they are awarded bounties based upon their performance (as measured by their peer nodes) at the end of each network epoch.

When an Elastic Sidechain has reached the end of its lifetime, the resources (computation, storage) of its virtualized subnodes will be freed so that they may participate in newly created Elastic Sidechains.