$17.1 Million Raised for Skale Network’s Mainnet Launch

  • The Ethereum-compatible blockchain scalability platform now has over 40 investors from the U.S., European Union, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore.
  • The newly raised funds will be used to expand the 20-man engineering team, improve security, and stabilize the network.

SKALE at the ETHBoston hackathon. SKALE Network

SKALE Network, an Ethereum-compatible blockchain scalability platform, recently completed a new funding round, raising $17.1 million for its mainnet launch, the company announced in a press release shared with CoinDesk on 1 October.

Skale Labs made a $10 million contribution, while the other $7 million came from 19 major industry investors, including Arrington XRP, ConsenSys Labs, Winklevoss Capital, Multicoin Capital, Blockchange, Hashed, HashKey and Recruit Holdings and others.

According to Jack O’Holleran, the CEO of Skale Labs, the network now has over 40 investors from the U.S., European Union, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, said:

“Skale has grown tremendously over the past year in almost every aspect. There’s a lot to like, and we’ve been impressed by their ability to set strategy, design spec, and execute. The product is also clearly hitting a nerve. I expect a majority of the smart contracts in the Ethereum ecosystem to eventually leverage Skale.”

The fully permissionless, open source, peer-to-peer network was first announced in October 2018, when Skale Labs was able to raise $9.65 million through a funding round led by Multicoin Capital.

At the time, the company stated that Skale will be the first implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on a Plasma chain. Part of the raised funds were used to launch a testnet in 2018, and then in April 2019, to establish the NODE Foundation, which is similar to the Ethereum Foundation.

The newly raised funds will not only be used to increase the security and stabilize Skale’s proof-of-stake network, but to also increase the network’s engineering team, which currently consists of 20 people.

The goal of the network is to allow DApps to conduct “millions of transactions per second at a fraction of the cost of what’s possible today”. According to a statement from O’Holleran, 23 different dapps are currently available on the Skale platform.

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