While reading up on Skale’s early history, I found this 2020 launch article that mentioned Skale Phase 2 going live with over $80 million in Total Value Locked (TVL). That’s incredible.
Today, Skale’s TVL is sitting around $220K, according to DeFiLlama. That’s a massive shift, and I’m not raising it to criticize — I’m asking because I think there’s something to learn from that early success.
What was Skale doing differently in 2020 that brought in that kind of traction and value?
Were there ecosystem incentives, onboarding strategies, or partnerships that Skale has since moved away from?
This also ties into Jack’s comments yesterday about the importance of increasing Skale’s TVL going forward. If there were effective strategies or community momentum back then, maybe there’s an opportunity to build on it now.
Would love to hear from anyone who was active during that time — especially @jackoholleran, @stan_kladko, or others from the team. Thanks in advance for any insight or context you’re willing to share.
Wow, that is a massive change in TVL. The market was quite different back then but a comparison study would be very interesting nonetheless. I think a lot of their initial budget was spent on marketing. This is the power of marketing!
My feeling was that SKALE missed the market timing. SKALE’s DeFi initiative on Europa launched in earnest in June 2022 and there was a massive money flight from defi right at that time. Terra Luna collapse and FTX collapse crushed many of the defi ecosystems other than Ethereum. We have tried 15 different tactics to help grow DeFi in Europa and we were not able to crack the nut. There are about 500K wallets that matter in defi and you need to attract those assets from other ecosystems if there is not new money entering defi.
My belief is that we need to launch the technical innovations combined with narrative/marketing push and some major partnerships to have a tidal wave movement. It is not going to happen slowly or iteratively with the type of campaigns and efforts we’ve been implementing. And SKALE has been implementing sophisticated best in practice campaigns. Also, defi moves around a lot and grows quickly during up markets. This is why we are hustling to get the balls in place for the technical innovations so we are positioned to capture defi value as we enter a new stage of growth (when that happens I wish I knew, but we need to be ready when it does!).
Sawyer and I had an interesting conversation on the subject today—it looks like the entire blockchain space is stuck. In 2020, people thought that by 2025 there would be huge adoption of blockchain, but it didn’t happen. Even chains that claim high TVL arguably have little real use.
People used to love the EVM, but now it seems like the Ethereum ecosystem is stuck. There’s a need for new ideas.
Sawyer pointed out an idea for a blockchain where all user data would be private, and users would control access by dapps to their data. That way, we could have an experience similar to what people have with centralized apps.
This would require running multiple instances of EVM. Essentially if EVM is a bot, currently there is a single bot that serves everyone. If data is confidential, every user would have its own bot and bots would be able to talk to each other.
We already have encryption/decryption in BITE so having confidential user data is doable