Introducing Skate: the First Universal Application Layer of All Chains

“Skate empowers apps to run on 1000s of chains with one state.”

Introduction

We are beyond excited to announce Range Protocol’s expansion to Skate, the universal application layer that empowers applications to run on 1000s of chains with a single state. Any new blockchain can easily connect to Skate, while both users and developers only need to interact with Skate alone to instantly access each network with unified liquidity.

Scaling solutions such as rollups have been rapidly expanding, but come with their own set of problems that include poor user experiences, redundant development efforts, liquidity fragmentation, and toxic liquidity flow.

These problems are merely symptoms of a larger issue: Application Fragmentation. In today’s multi-chain landscape, applications have the costly, time-consuming need to deploy, customize, and maintain their projects across an ever-increasing number of chains. Each deployment on each chain represents a fragmented state and for every new deployment, it only further fragments the application’s state.

Skate provides an easy means for new applications to deploy on any network, whilst connecting all existing liquidity through a hub-and-spoke architecture. This relies upon transactions being matched and executed by users who sign intents, which are executed in real-time by using EigenLayer for faster finality.

Why are we building Skate?

Application fragmentation is the root cause of many of Web3’s current liquidity challenges, and is the result of applications having differing “states”. State refers to the current status of the system at a particular point in time, such as how many items/assets each user has.

Consider DeFi alone: there are currently 1,200+ decentralized exchanges, 380+ lending protocols, and 220+ derivative protocols, each deployed across up to 30 networks. This means countless states must interact with one another, introducing immense complexity and incoherence. Other areas of Web3 face the same challenges and this is a major inhibitor to growth and ultimately industry adoption.

The issues can be summarized as follows:

• High Development Costs: Deploying and maintaining individual application states on new networks require significant developer resources and liquidity bootstrapping.
• Poor User Experience: In today’s multi-chain environment, there is increasing user friction. Users must bridge assets, learn about different applications on each chain’s ecosystem, and search for the best rates. This is a major barrier to onboard new users on-chain.
• Fragmented Liquidity: Fragmented liquidity on each application state leads to suboptimal pricing and slippage for end users. This is becoming increasingly prevalent as the number of chains are increasing yet not all of them are able to build deep liquidity pools.
• Toxic Flows: The current application fragmentation landscape leads to toxic liquidity flows like arbitrage and MEV. Arbitrageurs and MEV exist solely to extract value from LPs, instead of adding value to the chain.

Applications are intrinsically monolithic, resulting in different states across each network upon which they’re deployed. This means that every new network supported is a significant undertaking, and while existing liquidity and interoperability solutions focus on solving this at the network level, this is insufficient. Applications have differing states, which is the root cause of application fragmentation, and this cannot be addressed through network-level solutions alone.

True interoperability requires networks and applications to work hand-in-hand, and without solving this, every area of Web3 will struggle to scale.

Skate Introduces the Universal Application Scope

Skate introduces the concept of a Universal Application Scope, whereby Skate maintains a global state and application logic accessible to all chains.

We’ve made this possible by creating Skate based on the OP Stack, and using a hub-and-spoke model to connect to other networks. Transactions are executed by having users sign intents, and executed in real-time by relying upon EigenLayer for fast finality.

This means that Skate can monitor information such as pending orders, available liquidity, and an application’s internal mechanics (application logic), across all networks simultaneously. The Skate network itself will only hold application logic, rather than any assets. This means that an application leveraging Skate will have its state and application logic reside on the Skate Chain so that parties known as Executors can monitor for signed intents and help to execute them.

What does this mean?

The result is that applications become multichain, while developers can easily deploy an application of any type, on any network. There is also no need to expose oneself to bridging risks or to keep liquidity fragmented; instead, intents are simply signed and matched.

This has major implications for nearly every area of crypto, with use cases extending across all verticals including DeFi, NFTs, Gaming, SocialFi and more.

Imagine an Ethereum application focused on asset tokenization. With Skate’s innovative technology, the same application can now be extended to support Solana, Arbitrum, and 100s of other chains of differing tech stacks, allowing users to interact with it through intents while maintaining the same state across all blockchains. This means that actions taken by users on Solana will be reflected on other chains and vice versa, providing a seamless and unified experience.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, with Skate, a myriad of possibilities unfolds, as innovative cross-app and cross-chain products emerge.

Who are we?

Our highly skilled team consists of financial engineers and Web3 developers with a wealth of experience in digital asset trading. During our time as Range protocol, we supported 10 blockchain networks, reached $30M+ in TVL, and developed partnerships with leading DeFi networks and applications. We previously completed a seed round led by Hashkey Capital and Nomad Capital including participation from Symbolic Capital, Mantle EcoFund, Comma3 Ventures, Spark Digital Capital, Mirana Ventures, Asymm Ventures.

More recently, Skate has secured the backing of Web3 founders from EigenLayer, Polygon, Manta, Axelar, Biconomy, Pendle, A41, Vertex, Navi, Pontem, Galxe and more.

Over the near term, we’ll be focused heavily on integrating with top-tier partners and applications. We’ll also be sharing more specific information relating to our architecture at a technical level.

What’s next?

In the coming days, we will be launching our first campaign for early supporters of Skate.

Make sure you follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/skate_chain or join our Telegram https://t.me/skatechain to be early!