Oasis Labs builds a privacy-first, high performance cloud computing platform on blockchain. The Oasis Network separates consensus from computation, making the platform highly adaptable while enabling high-performance computation.

This AMA allowed users to connect with Oasis labs DeFi lead Luca Cosentino, Andrew Miller Product Marketing Manager and Jon Poole Community Manager and Business Development, who answered the questions and listened to the feedback.

I am Luca, I am Italian and live in SF. My background is in Product at P&G, AmEx, and Google. I moved to the US for an MBA at UC Berkeley.Having experienced how large enterprises and consumers deal with data, I had an idea around creating a better technology that creates a fair way to enable data collaborations.I met with prof. Dawn Song at UC Berkeley while she was working on starting Oasis; I absolutely loved the vision and decided to join her company.

I am Andrew,I run product marketing here at Oasis, I have a background working in startups, and have always been passionate about privacy — so Oasis and it’s vision really resonated with my interests. I joined about two years ago.

I’m Jon, Community Manager and Business Development for Oasis! I first joined Oasis back in June 2018 and it’s been an incredible journey along the way. My blockchain background comes from the private investor side, so naturally when evaluating Oasis as a scalability solution during the scaling wars of 2018 my mind was expanded to see what Dawn Song’s vision had in store for blockchain, and I had to be a part of it!

Question from the CryptoRank team

#1. Can you shortly describe the Oasis Labs platform, the milestones you have achieved, and about your upcoming plans?

Andrew: – The Oasis Network is the first privacy-enabled blockchain platform for open finance and a responsible data economy. Combined with its high throughput and secure architecture, the Oasis Network is able to power private, scalable DeFi, revolutionizing Open Finance and expanding it beyond traders and early adopters to a mass market. Its unique privacy features can not only redefine DeFi, but also create a new type of digital asset called Tokenized Data that can enable users to take control of the data they generate and earn rewards for staking it with applications — creating the first ever responsible data economy.

The communit has seen a lot of progress in the last few months. Just last week we successfully launched Mainnet Beta with a large pool of validator nodes. This is a huge step for the community, and the last major milestone before Mainnet.

We’ve also recently announced major partnerships and projects being built on the network including a new privacy-first genome sequencing integration with Nebula Genomics where customers can own their genome data, a new CryptoSafe alliance with Binance to help combat crypto fraud, and a new Ethereum compatible compute environment built by Second State on the Oasis Network — allowing us to support all existing DApps on Ethereum with better performance and lower gas fees.

CryptoRank community questions

#2. Which area are you focusing on at the moment? (DeFi, Stake,Dapps..) and what is your goals in this year ?

Luca: – We are focusing on Open Money and Open Data, on top of on creating a very strong network (with validators). We think this has 3 phases (not necessarily sequential)
1. Build a strong decentralized network by attracting top node operators
2. Build a strong development platform by attracting main services and protocols
3. Increase adoption of the network by attracting Dapps

Attracting validators and creating the right incentives for token holders to stake is a priority of every blockchain project. Our Mainnet Beta gave really convincing answers.
The creation of a network of protocols and services that are consumable via our network is also going very well – our ecosystem is extremely rich.
Over the next couple of weeks we will release extremely positive news that show how our platform is also growing in attracting Dapps, which is an incredibly great achievement considering we just released our Mainnet Beta

#3. I am a common user who uses social networks, search engines and little else. What kind of data would we handle within Oasis? Can you list or classify what data we are talking about?

Jon: – The team has recently come out and stated that our main competition is the internet itself. Imagine all your user data (especially the data collected by social media companies and search engines) was collected in a safe environment where you didn’t have to accept forfeiting your rights to your data in order to use the internet or a social media network,. You owned the data yourself and not the search engine, or the social media company who sells that data to third parties without you ever being able to ask for it back. You could then stake that data for donation to research, or if a third party sees value in your data, they may ask to rent the use of it from you!

#4. Most projects have programs that interact with their users. Does you have any special plans to attract and expand the community and improve the user experience?

Jon: – We have many ongoing community programs that I would love to share! We have our Ambassador Program  which has a special incentive breakdown only available to ambassadors. We also have weekly Community Cup Campaigns where you can earn the ROSE token before it goes public! We also have a weekly lottery for those who participate in the Community Cup. Come Join us to earn ROSE Tokens!

#5. Who are the biggest competitors of Oasis Labs ? And how does the team plans to overtake it’s competitors?

Andrew: – The biggest competitor for the Oasis Network is the web. We see our platform providing primitives such as data ownership, immutability, and confidentiality, that the current web just cannot provide — making the Oasis Network a preferred solution for the next generation of digital apps and services that respect user privacy.

#6. I’ve heard Oasis talk a lot about privacy. How does the network achieve this? Is it using a particular kind of technology like Homomorphic Encryption?

Andrew: – Yes! We’ve got a reference ParaTime called the Oasis Eth/WASI Runtime, which uses Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) which act as a kind of a black box for all smart contract execution. Encrypted data goes into the black box along with the smart contract, data is decrypted, processed by the Smart Contract/application, and then encrypted before it’s sent out of the TEE. I can go into more technical detail if folks are interested.

This is just one example of confidential compute on the network. ParaTimes could also be built to use HE as you mentioned, or other types of privacy-preserving technologies as they become available.