ON-386: SKALE 🌊

📝 Note from the Editor-in-Chief

Today I’m sharing a bittersweet update: OurNetwork is going on an indefinite hiatus. Today’s issue will be our last for the foreseeable future.

I started OurNetwork in the depths of the 2018 bear market to publish truly crypto-native research that was useful, legible, and grounded in onchain data — at a time when narratives on Crypto Twitter routinely overwhelmed fundamentals and what was actually happening onchain.

What I’m most proud of is the community. Over the seven years since our genesis issue, OurNetwork became home to a deep bench of onchain analysts whose work materially raised the level of discourse — not just within the publication, but across the broader crypto ecosystem. We are all better analysts, builders, users and investors because of their contributions.

I’ll break one of my long-standing editorial rules — that cumulative statistics are often incomplete at best and misleading at worst — to note that we have published nearly 387 consecutive weekly issues, reaching more than 33,000 readers each week. The consistency mattered, and the work compounded.

It has been a privilege to steward this project, but it’s time for OurNetwork to either evolve under new stewardship or pause indefinitely. I believe there’s still meaningful work to be done in advancing our mission of crypto education and financial empowerment, and I’m actively exploring what that could look like. If there’s an update, I’ll share it. If not, I’m grateful for what we built together.

Spencer Noon 🕛
Founder & Project Lead

AI Agents | x402 | Privacy for Agents | SKALE's Agentic Ecosystem

Unless someone's been living under the proverbial rock, it would be hard not to know that AI has become a key driver of the economy. Specifically agents, a term for AI-enabled entities operating with minimal supervision, are becoming a focal point for organizations. A report from McKinsey found that 62% of 1,933 polled organizations were either experimenting with, or scaling, agentic systems.

Crypto hasn't been untouched by AI. Projects like Render and Akash are focused on providing a decentralized compute marketplace. The Graph and others are working on verifiable AI, ways of cryptographically proving systems' inputs, outputs, and models. There's also x402, a payments protocol launched by Coinbase which is a significant contender to become a key financial rail for AI agents. x402 came alive in October after its May 2025 launch.

While the number of x402 transactions has trended downward somewhat, the number of non-gamed transactions has reduced to essentially zero.

While agents running on crypto rails is an exciting prospect, new feature sets will be necessary for digital entities' deployments to increasingly use blockchains. One such change is privacy, an area of focus for SKALE.

SKALE's key offering in the space is BITE (Blockchain Integrated Threshold Encryption) which offers:

• private transactions (+ shielded balances)
• conditional transactions
• encrypted execution

This makes it so agents can operate without exposing their strategy, balances, or intent to competitors and front-runners. SKALE is also bringing gas-free, instant (as well as private) transactions to any blockchain, starting with Base, as part of the SKALE Expand initiative.

SKALE is also stewarding an emerging agentic ecosystem, especially in the x402 space. Facilitators, which independently verify and settle transactions, like PayAI and x402x, are gaining traction on SKALE. There are also registries for agents like Khorus and Astrasync. And HTTPayer is also developing a x402-enabled payment router powered by SKALE.

Follow along here as SKALE builds out the agentic infrastructure of the future.