In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Skale Labs CEO Jack O’Holleran about how the Ethereum-centric L1 blockchain network is expanding to Base, helping launch mobile game PGA Tour Rise, and preparing for the explosion of onchain AI agents.
BlockchainGamer.biz: Tell us about PGA Tour Rise?
Jack O’Holleran: I think it is a big win for the Skale community because we’ve signed hundreds and hundreds of games, right? And this is probably our biggest IP. I think it’s awesome. It’s also good for the industry. It’s been in the works for a long time. It used to be every major sports league was launching web3 games but we haven’t seen that for a while.
Part of that was the lack of legal clarity. Leagues don’t want to launch crypto assets and have all this liability and get a letter from Gary Gensler. So it’s a good signal for the whole space that these things are launching, and people are putting money into them because they think they’re gonna be successful
The game is mixture of golf gameplay any empire-building, right?
What do people like? Look at Clash of Clans. It’s so addicting because you’re building, farming, waiting but you’re also battling other people. It’s a similar concept in that you’re building up your own golf course and you’re trying to max out how much revenue you’re getting. But also, you can get a new club, so I might get paired to play against you, and I’m going to be able to hit it further than you. So you have these little golf games as well as a bigger Railroad Tycoon-meets-Clash of Clans-type base-builder game.
The other interesting thing is it works really well for web3 games. In the game, they’re not called NFTs. They’re crypto digital assets. I’d say it’s like a next generation of the gaming NFT movement. And it makes a lot of sense. I’m building up this economic base, that’s my course and ultimately, I’m getting better and better assets to go compete and I can sell those. I can utilize a marketplace.
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I think one thing people are going to start realizing is that blockchain gaming is frankly just gaming with much better economic rails. We’ve got transparent databases that are immutable and we have assets that have true ownership. But at the end of the day, all these things flow into having just a more optimized economy. So I’m excited to see how this plays in the real world as this game launches. It’ll be fun.
Related to this is that Skale has expanded to Base. PGA Tour Rise runs on both Skale and Base.
I’ll try to give a framework that’ll make sense for people. So you could think of Skale like a control dashboard. It’s almost like a brain. That’s the authority of Skale. And the Skale Network, there are all these blockchains. That’s all happening because Skale’s smart contracts on Ethereum are like an operating system that uses the security of Ethereum to manage these other L1s in the Skale Network.
Now the cool thing is these L1s have their own finality. They run consensus, whereas in L2 blockchains, they have to send everything back to Ethereum, and then you’re gated and have costs that are related to the mainnet. So we can have better performance and lower costs with this model while still borrowing some security from the Ethereum base layer. What we’ve done here is we’ve taken that brain or that control center, that operating system, and we’ve moved it. We’ve put another version of that on Base. Base is also EVM or Ethereum Virtual Machine, so it only took a couple of weeks to have another instance running on top of Base.
The cool thing is all the connectivity between that Skale (on Base chain) and Base is near instant and it’s free when you come to Skale, although there’s a small transaction fee when you go back to Base in terms of bridging. Also, this means Skale is connected to the liquidity on Base in a really dynamic and integrated way. I think we bring the strengths of the Skale Network to Base, strengthening them where they have weaknesses. We’re bringing big brands over, bringing PGA and all of a sudden you’re buying things on Base that you would never have bought before because we have this integration point. So yeah, that’s the premise.
To play PGA Tour Rise is my wallet connecting to Base or Skale?
You can go now and purchase assets on Base. You’re paying on Base, but they’re minted on the Skale on Base chain. What we want is users not to know or care, right? There’s a transaction happening. Okay, it just cost me dramatically less because it’s on the Skale chain. But do I know what database it’s on? I shouldn’t know, and I shouldn’t care that much, frankly.
And you’re planning to expand Skale to other blockchains?
The integrations are pretty easy. This expansion to Base, it’s not an experiment. It’s a market test to see how well it works. And if it works really well, I’d love to see this live on other major chain ecosystems. We can go to where users are and the liquidity is. Why should we limit where we play or enable people to play? It’ll take more effort to get it on Solana. I’d love to see it on Solana at some point, but it has to go into SVM for that code because it needs to utilize the chain for security and a lot of functionality.
So we’ve been talking about gaming on Skale, but you’re also well-positioned for AI agents, right?
I see the whole agentic movement as being very complementary with what we’re doing with gaming, because I think games are going to be a major place for agentic commerce. We don’t just want bots playing games. We want bots helping us buy things, move things, sell things. Imagine if you have an agent that’s helping you figure out which game assets to buy and sell. It says, ‘You’d better go level this up, and it’ll be worth a lot because this category is doing well’. I think that’s just scratching the surface of what agents will do in gaming. We see the agent market really, really booming. I think agents are going to turbocharge gaming. And the reality is blockchain gaming needs a little boost right now. I think it’s going to get it from AI.
The features that make Skale good for gaming – low fees, fast transactions – also make Skale good for agents.
Yes. What is Skale best at? It’s super-high volume transactions and really low costs. Okay. Agents need that. The other thing we just launched is privacy. In the next version of Skale, Alice can send Bob 10 golf credits or 10 USDC or 10 ETH, and no-one can know what Bob or Alice’s balance is, or how much was sent, other than Alice and Bob. We called the Barista Test. You go buy a cup of coffee. Do you really want the barista to know if you’re using USDC, how much money you have, what else you’ve bought and what other assets you have? You want a level of privacy, so agents, we think, are going to really need that too. People are going to start tracking these agents. Agents are going to track agents and try to discern information about who has money. We can stop that from happening with this privacy feature.
I guess the only question is how quickly blockchain games can adopt this technology? Can current games use it or do you have to start from scratch, building the sort of game you couldn’t have thought of before?
There’s gotta be someone who just takes the elements and deploys them and says, ‘Here it is, it’s working’. There’s gonna be one big success, and everyone’s like, ‘Wow, I wish I had done that. I wish I had thought of that. We will see somebody build for that and figure that out.
That’s what we’re trying. We’re doing a big hackathon with Google, Coinbase, and a couple of others in February to get that innovation going. Hackathons are a great way to do that, but yeah, we’re still early. Things move fast and now with agentic products, if you want to build something, you can build it 10 times faster.
Find out more at the Skale website.
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