Ekiden protocol by Oasis labs
A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contract Execution
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Oasis Labs is rethinking blockchain for the real world. Built from the ground up with cutting-edge technologies, Ekiden is the first smart contract platform to provide security, privacy, and high scalability.
It is a system for highly performant and confidentiality-preserving smart contract execution system that can perform thousands of transactions per second. The key to this achievement is an effective combination of blockchains and trusted hardware. Ekiden combines any desired underlying blockchain system (permission or permissionless) with TEE (Trusted Execution Environments)-based execution. Anchored in a formal security model that is expressed as a cryptographic ideal functionality, its principled design supports rigorous analysis of its security properties.
Blockchains and trusted enclaves have complementary security properties that can be combined effectively to provide a powerful, generic platform for confidentiality-preserving smart contracts. The result is a compelling programming model that over-comes significant challenges in blockchain smart contracts. Ekiden can be used to implement a variety of secure decentralized applications that compute on sensitive data.
Ekiden relies on upon compute nodes that use trusted hardware to perform smart contract computation over private data off the chain, then attest to their correct execution on chain. The underlying blockchain is maintained by consensus nodes, which need not use trusted hardware. It is agnostic to consensus-layer mechanics, only requiring that the blockchain is capable of validating remote attestations from compute nodes.
Whitepaper
One of the best papers I read in a while!
I just love how clear and technically well whitepaper is written. It is a clear result of academic and research background and experience of the team members. I won't go into much more details here but I will advise everyone to read it and see what qualities a good whitepaper should have.
Key points
• the first confidentiality-preserving smart contract system that can perform thousands of transactions per second.
• a system that addresses blockchains lack of confidentiality and poor performance by combining blockchains with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs)
• smart contracts deployed on Ediken are endowed with strong confidentiality, integrity and availability guarantee. Ekiden achieves these properties with an ahybrid architecture combining trusted hardware and the blockchain
• there are three types of entities in Ekiden: Clients, compute nodes and consensus nodes
• it relies on efficient proofs of publication that prove to a contract TEE that an item has been stored in the blockchain.
Team
The team is really strong with 5 team members with Ph.D. in computer science. Oasis labs are hiring at the moment and the team is still growing.
Investors
There are very few details about project that is in such an early phase. However multiple VCs and Binance labs are backing up the projects meaning there is a good chance it will be closed for public investors.
Social media
Webpage: https://www.oasislabs.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/oasislabs (502 members 02/06/2018)
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OasisLabs
Verdict
Project in very early stage with minimum or no social media engagement and yet hype is growing fast around it. The team doesn't have a direct blockchain experience but plenty of academic computer science background. The blockchain experience is not worrying as not many have it in this early stage of blockchain development and this team have all that is needed for success.
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