SKALE on Base: Privacy and Performance for the Internet of Agents

AI agents are starting to do real work onchain. They monitor markets, manage wallets, trigger payments, and coordinate with other agents. Every one of those actions leaves a trail on public blockspace.

In today’s infrastructure, that transparency creates a serious problem for agents:

• Every action and intent is visible in the mempool.
• Strategies can be copied or front-run by anyone watching.
• Address patterns can expose which entities control which agents.

Agents need a place to operate where strategies and control relationships stay private, without giving up the benefits of public blockchains. They also need reliable performance and costs that support high volume microtransactions.

SKALE on Base, now live, is designed as that environment. It brings encrypted agent execution, real time performance, and gasless microtransactions into the Base ecosystem. It is the first deployment of the SKALE Expand initiative, created with the goal of bringing one billion agents onchain.

What Is Launching: SKALE on Base

SKALE on Base is a SKALE chain environment inside the Base ecosystem, tailored for agents and x402 style machine payments.

The SKALE Manager contracts that power SKALE chains are now deployed on Base. This lets agent-focused teams on Base deploy on SKALE chains that:

• Provide private, encrypted execution that keeps agent strategies, internal state, and interactions confidential.
  
  
• Give agents and their users a gasless environment funded with prepaid compute credits.
  
  
• Confirm agent transactions and loop steps in less than one second.

Agents and developers get SKALE’s gasless, instant, and private execution while staying connected to Base’s users, liquidity, and onramps. This launch utilizes the SKALE V4 upgrades and is the first realization of SKALE Expand on a major L2.

Agentic Privacy: Keeping Agent Intent and Identity Hidden

Agents encode valuable logic. They hold strategies, scoring models, and internal state about portfolios and counterparties. On open mempools, that behavior is visible and can be copied, front-run, or reverse engineered.

SKALE on Base makes agentic privacy the primary feature:

• Transactions use the BITE protocol for encryption so agent actions, strategies, and intent stay private and much harder to copy or frontrun.
• Encrypted data avoids doxxing, making it difficult to link onchain agents to the entities or operators that control them.
• Flows remain verifiable onchain while core logic and control relationships stay hidden.

This model lets agents manage sensitive operations, transfer value, and coordinate with one another without leaking their internal logic or exposing who is behind them.

Performance for Agents: Speed and Cost

Once privacy is in place, agents still need reliable performance. SKALE on Base is built around two aspects of performance that matter most to agents: speed and cost.

Speed: Instant Finality for Real-Time Loops

Agents need to poll data, react to events, and complete multi-step workflows within seconds. On many chains, congestion and uncertain finality break those flows.

SKALE on Base is tuned for real time style behavior:

• Confirmations in less than one second.
• High throughput for large fleets of agents running in parallel.
• Consistent execution characteristics that keep agent loops reliable.

These properties support x402 payments, ERC-8004, and agent-to-agent interactions at speeds that match or exceed typical Web2 systems.

Cost: Microtransactions Without Gas Anxiety

Agents often need to fire thousands of tiny actions, messages, and payments. On traditional gas models, many of those steps are too expensive to justify.

On SKALE on Base:

• Agents and users do not pay gas for each transaction.
• Applications and operators pre-pay for credits on Base using USDC or SKL.
• Credits map to compute capacity on SKALE on Base and are consumed as agents run.

Zero gas fees at the transaction level make high volume microtransactions and dense x402 flows practical. Agent operators get a usage-based, predictable model that feels similar to AI and cloud platforms and scales cleanly from early experiments to large, always on fleets.

Special Features for Agents

Beyond privacy and performance, SKALE on Base includes features that are specifically useful for agent-native systems.

Gasless Transactions for Agent UX

Agents often interact with many user accounts, contracts, and other agents. Requiring every address to hold gas fragments UX and slows adoption.

Gasless transactions on SKALE on Base let:

• Agents sign and execute actions without worrying about per-transaction gas balances.
• Teams abstract away gas from end users while still running fully onchain.

This is especially important for agent-to-agent commerce and machine-to-machine payment flows, where human operators are not present to constantly top up wallets.

Bridged Tokens Become Native x402 Assets

Tokens that bridge from Base to SKALE on Base are represented in a way that makes them ERC-3009 compatible, which in turn makes them x402 compatible for agent payment flows.

As a result:

• Assets that originate on Base can participate in x402 style payments on SKALE on Base.
• Agents can use familiar tokens in recurring payments, streaming microtransactions, and other machine payment patterns without custom wrapping logic.

This creates a clean path for existing Base assets to become native building blocks for agent economies.

Base and SKALE Together

SKALE on Base combines the strengths of both ecosystems and creates an environment where agents can thrive.

SKALE provides:

• Private, agent optimized execution.
• A gasless environment suited to continuous agent activity.
• Instant, predictable finality.

Base provides:

• Growing liquidity.
• User access through Coinbase and other onramps.
• Strong distribution for builders.

Agents can run high frequency, private workflows on SKALE on Base while using Base for custody, liquidity, and user interfaces.

SKALE Expand: The Agent Layer Behind Many Chains

SKALE on Base is the first live example of SKALE Expand, which turns SKALE into an agent layer that can sit behind multiple EVM chains.

By deploying SKALE Manager to different networks, SKALE Expand lets teams reuse the same agent stack: agents run on SKALE for gasless, private, high volume execution, while users and assets remain on the host chain. Agent builders gain a single, consistent execution model that can reach many ecosystems over time.

Helpful links:

SKALE on Base:

https://blog.skale.space/base

Developer Docs:

https://docs.skale.space/welcome/skale-on-base/

SKALE Builders Group:

https://t.me/+o_7DCw9qcbI2NDYx