Jack O’Holleran is the CEO and co-founder of SKALE, a multichain network designed for Ethereum dApps. He is a tech entrepreneur focused on developing blockchain and decentralized systems. ^[1]

Education

O’Holleran graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a B.S. in Business Administration in 2005. ^[1]

Career

After graduating, O’Holleran worked as an account executive at Good Technology, a mobile security provider, selling software to various government corporations. In 2007, the company was acquired by Motorola, so he joined the business development and product strategy team, where he worked until May 2008. ^[1]

O’Holleran co-founded Aktana, an AI engagement software for life science companies, in 2008. He helped build the company from a four-person startup to a global company. During this time, he also worked as a coach and mentor at Alchemist Accelerator, a venture capital company. ^[1]

O’Holleran later worked at a SaaS development company called SaaStr. He discovered Bitcoin in 2011 but didn’t enter the crypto space until 2013 when he started researching decentralized applications and Ethereum. ^[2]

“I got introduced to Bitcoin actually in 2011, but I have to say I didn't truly understand it. Then, in 2013, I kind of went down the rabbit hole. And when Ethereum launched, I got really excited about that. And then when I was starting my next company, I frankly was going—I was working out of a place called SaaStr, which is an incubator for SaaS companies, software as a service companies. And every day, I was just spending all day reading about crypto and trading crypto.”

“I realized that there are new types of businesses to be created that are community-owned and community-governed, and have tremendous growth potential in so many different areas. So, I couldn't go back. That's how I got into blockchain.”

SKALE

In 2017, O’Holleran was working on starting a new blockchain company when he met Stan Kladko, a world-renowned physicist and cryptographer, who was also trying to develop a few dApps of his own. After discussing their ideas, they decided to create the SKALE Network. In 2018, O’Holleran became the CEO of SKALE and a director of N.O.D.E. Anstalt, a subsidiary of the NODE Foundation, SKALE’s non-profit supporter. ^[2][3]

“I had all these apps that I wanted to start to help bring value to users and transform industries, and then I met Stan Kladko, my co-founder.”

“So, I was working on starting Adapt, and Stan, my co-founder, was working on starting six different apps. He said, 'Yeah, he said I can do a decentralized Uber, and I'm working on a thing for a Twitter payments platform, and I have a decentralized exchange, and I want to build this.' Stan's brilliant; he's a technical visionary. I said, 'Stan, why do you think you can build all five of these things?' And you know, we got in front of a whiteboard, he mapped out the architecture. He says, 'Well, here's what I would build, here's what it would look like.' I said, 'You know what,' and our brains came together, and we're like, 'Let's go build SKALE.’”

O’Holleran and Kladko believed in Ethereum and wanted to make it more accessible with lower gas fees. Their ideas for SKALE also came before discussions of Layer-2, app chains, and Ethereum scaling. ^[3]

“Let's help people like us because we believe in Ethereum. Let's enable people to access Ethereum in a more accessible way without gas fees and in a financially viable manner that still anchors into Ethereum's security. That's because before people weren't talking about Layer-2, they weren't talking about app chains. They weren't talking about Ethereum scalability, and that was really, and we didn't want to. It was at this time you were either trying to build a competitive layer one or you were on the app level and we or and so for us that was our own needs drove the requirements for scale and then we formally started the project June or January 1st, 2018.”

Interviews

About SKALE

During REIMAGINE 2020, O’Holleran discussed what SKALE is, how it works, and his visions for the future of blockchain. When asked how the network works, he first explained the central feature, “Elastic Chains”:^[2]

“Let me tell you about sidechains. Sidechains have a lot of amazing properties with very good user experience, seamless interoperability between the other blockchain and another blockchain. And if they're running the same base software like Ethereum, for example, then there's full interoperability and composability as well. The issue is that side chains have a smaller number of computers or nodes that run the blockchain.”

“So what SKALE does is it has a unique model where at the end of the day a developer gets only 16 nodes. They get a small set of nodes running their blockchain, but those nodes are picked from this really big pool…Then what happens is there are validators that run all of these nodes, and there will be hundreds of nodes in the network. Each of these nodes is broken up into smaller pieces. So if I say, "Hey, I have a decentralized exchange, I have a DeFi application, I have a payments platform, and I want to get a SKALE chain," well, then actually the Ethereum mainnet talks to SKALE, and then without any people being involved, it randomly selects some nodes and pulls them in. They say, "These are your nodes," and that's what makes this an elastic side chain or I even like to call them elastic shards.”

He then went on to explain how the networks communicate and assign nodes to developers:^[2]

“These smart contracts actually communicate with every node, and each node has its own node core, functioning like its own brain. It's analogous to a bee colony, where all the nodes communicate with the "queen bee," which is Ethereum, and autonomously organize themselves to be assigned back to users. The pool of nodes constitutes the SKALE nodes, starting with hundreds but with aspirations for tens of thousands in the future. Each node can be on 128 different SKALE chains, potentially providing around 8,000 chains from about a thousand nodes.”

When asked what an “elastic” blockchain was, O’Holleran responded:^[2]

“There are two elements that contribute to the elasticity of the system, which is why we selected that term. One aspect involves the structure of how nodes are assigned, as we discussed earlier. The other aspect is sizing and configuration, a common concept in enterprise settings. When purchasing services from providers like Salesforce.com, Amazon, or Google Cloud, customers no longer require custom code as was the case with on-premise software. Instead, they focus on configuration, seeking off-the-shelf solutions tailored to their specific needs, costs, use cases, and desired features and functionality.”

“With SKALE, users have the flexibility to adjust the size of their chain according to their project's scale and requirements. For instance, a small project may opt for a minimal chain, consisting of one 128th of 16 nodes, while a larger project might require the entire set of 16 nodes. In the future, users may have even more granular control, specifying fractions or entire sets of 128 nodes, with costs scaling accordingly. This elasticity also extends to the ability to activate privacy features, leveraging technologies like SGX within the network, among other customizable options to suit individual preferences and requirements.”

He also expressed what the team at SKALE is working for:^[2]

“We need it. Really, for us, for the vision to come together where we have millions and hundreds of millions of users using Ethereum a day. And SKALE, we need ETH2. We want it. It's going to dramatically improve scalability, and really, we get 64 versions of Ethereum that are all faster instead of one. And so, SKALE can connect to all of those.”

“Why do you still need Scale? It's not just a question of what's the throughput like; we can measure throughput of transactions per second and say, is there enough? So, people like to think of blockchains like Visa – oh, it's just a payment layer. The reality is, smart contracts are a compute layer. And so, when you need to incorporate logic to transactions…And what SKALE does is it gives each application their own backend, and then everything happens in the backend. When the money needs to leave, it goes back to Ethereum, and what happens on SKALE kind of gets rectified and then passed over, and the money goes to the user as if it never left. So, the developers like it because they get their own safe, secure version of Ethereum.”