AMA Highlights — Oasis Network

By Daniel Dal Bello, Director.
October 26, 2020–7 min read.

On Thursday 22 October, we welcomed Jon Poole and Andrew Miller from Oasis Network into the Hillrise Group Telegram chat for an AMA.

Jon runs community management and business development, and Andrew works in product marketing.

Founded in 2018, Oasis Labs is building a privacy-first high performance cloud computing platform. The project is VC-funded with $45 million from prominent investors a16z, Pantera Capital, Binance, and Accel. They’re developing cutting-edge privacy tech including a broad suite of privacy solutions ranging from user privacy management, to data-in-use protection and regulatory compliance.

In this post, we have compiled key questions and answers from the event.

Daniel Dal Bello
Oasis Labs is an interesting company as you’re extremely well funded by big names in our industry and are now ready to move back into the limelight.
Let’s start with introductions and background on your path to where you are currently. What motivates you to be a part of Oasis?

Jon Poole
Good morning everyone! I’m Jon Poole, Community Manager and Business Development for Oasis! I’ve been part of Oasis since June 2018.

My blockchain background comes from the private investor side, before shifting into CM & BD. I was introduced to Oasis, and the rest is history. When I understood what Dawn Song’s vision had in store for blockchain, like so many of our team, I felt I had to be a part of it!

Andrew Miller
Sure, my name is Andrew Miller. I run Product Marketing here at Oasis. I have a background working in startups in Silicon Valley, and have always been passionate about privacy — so Oasis and its vision really resonated with my interests.

I joined Oasis about two years ago.

Ray Reijnders
You have launched your mainnet beta back in early October — congratulations.

How has this beta been so far, have you come across any specific bottlenecks or are you still moving ahead at full speed towards the full release?

Andrew Miller
Mainnet beta is great so far. We launched in under a minute and have over 70 validators active on the network. This is really the last final check, if you will, before Mainnet. Everything is exactly the same as Mainnet, except transfers are turned off.

So we’re getting close! Very excited!

Daniel Dal Bello
There’s a couple of really good privacy focused projects, are you familiar with Secret Network?

Jon Poole
I’m very familiar with Secret Network! Tor and Guy have done an amazing job with both their project and community. They have evolved over time in many ways like we have to grow and foster a new ecosystem called Secret Network from what was originally Enigma.

We have some key differences, one of which is our ability to scale well beyond their network. Privacy and scalability are more of our focus, and we have a very different architecture to their blockchain.

Daniel Dal Bello
When compared to the broader blockchain and crypto-space — Oasis already has quite a few use cases. Are there any new products in the pipeline? It would be very interesting to see more of these fascinating examples of how confidentiality can help us to work together more efficiently.

Andrew Miller
Yes! We want the Oasis Network to be valuable for blockchain developers as well as mainstream enterprises. To that end, we’ve spent quite a bit of time working on new tooling and projects to support easy development.

Here are just a few projects that are already on the network:

Nebula Genomics
Nebula Genomics wants to differentiate their product from other competitors by giving their users control of their genetic data. Using Oasis’ framework, customers can retain ownership of their genomic data and Nebula Genomics can run analysis on the data without seeing the customer’s raw information.

Binance CryptoSafe Alliance
Crypto theft and attacks are on the rise, and exchanges need a platform to identify and ban bad actors. The CryptoSafe Platform was developed by Oasis Labs and Binance to allow exchanges to share threat intelligence data. Because of Oasis Network’s support for confidential compute, exchange data is kept confidential even while it’s being compared.

Fortune 500 Healthcare
A Fortune 500 healthcare provider wanted to share data with external parties while retaining control of the data and protecting the confidentiality of patient data. Using an API built by Oasis Labs this leading healthcare company is able to track, trace, and control data usage even when shared with 3rd parties.

Daniel Dal Bello
The project with Nebula sounds fascinating. I recall a whole controversy about DNA startups and data control. Nice one.

Andrew Miller
Yeah! Nebula is a fantastic company and a great partner. They are very interested in blockchain, and passionate about user privacy. I encourage you all to go check them out if you’re interested in getting your Genome sequenced. You can read more about it on our blog here.

Daniel Dal Bello
In this primer you mention that Oasis is more efficient than both sharding architecture and Parachains. How does Oasis use this to position itself in the market, and do you intend to compete with the more popular layer-1 protocols such as Ethereum and Polkadot?

Andrew Miller
Sure! In many ways scalability that is on par with some of the great chains like Ethereum and Polkadot is really a requirement for any layer-1.

We see the Oasis Network really standing out because:

(a) it has support for confidential compute, allowing it to support new and innovative use cases that require handling sensitive data and fixing many of the existing issues with DeFi such as front running, and
(b) as being incredibly versatile. Because the network separates Consensus from compute, and puts little restrictions on the kind of compute environments that can be built, the network has the ability to simultaneously support enterprise use cases, fully open compute networks, and specialized runtimes for machine learning, AI, etc.

Ray Reijnders
You have built a worldwide community, active in over 12 countries. You also have a large focus on education, with more than 25 university departments and other blockchain-focused avenues working with you. How did you end up putting this much focus on these two parts of your community, and what are some of the best practices that you’ve learned from setting all of these initiatives up?

Jon Poole
Well, to be honest the universities felt natural. We come from such a strong academic team with a professor from UC Berkeley (our Founder and CEO — Dawn Song) and alumni from numerous Ivy league schools that integrating with their blockchain clubs was a win-win situation. We have interns who love the work experience which leads to the beginning of a great career, and we were able to offer grants to setup nodes at many of these University Blockchain clubs so future generations can learn how our network works and more!

Did I mention that the schools get to keep the validator rewards?

The Global Ambassador Program was something out of necessity. We recognize that data is the new oil, and users around the world need to stand together united in order to allow change to happen. If we don’t reach mass adoption then we will never have the ability to drive a new economic world within data markets.

Daniel Dal Bello
One of the main pain points for many projects is that many traditional enterprise and institutions are not yet open to using blockchain in any really meaningful way.

How are you approaching this and did the academic and tech backgrounds help in this area?

Andrew Miller
I think the biggest reason we’ve seen traction with enterprises is because of our architecture. The fact that we can keep data private, means that bigger companies feel much more comfortable using our system.

Our privacy architecture allows data to remain confidential even from the node operator. This level of security and confidentiality is critical for any businesses thinking about storing or even processing data on a blockchain network.

“The fact that we can keep data private, means that bigger companies feel much more comfortable using our system. Our privacy architecture allows data to remain confidential even from the node operator.”

Beyond that, Oasis Labs has a fantastic team of engineers that are able to collaborate closely with enterprise teams to build meaningful use cases, and find applications of blockchain that make the most sense.

For most companies, running everything on-chain isn’t feasible, so finding those specific use cases where the privacy and integrity of the Oasis Network adds value requires close collaboration.

Daniel Dal Bello
What is the latest regarding a secondary market for ROSE?

Jon Poole
Right now we’re doing something unique with our community by being the first layer-1 blockchain to host a ‘Token Distribution Event’ in the form of a Stake Farm!

Much like yield farming in many of the popular DeFi vegetable and fruit projects, you stake your stablecoin and earn ROSE tokens in return!
After the initial stage of farming (40 days) you’ll receive all your stablecoin back in full, and you can then stake your earned ROSE tokens to cultivate even more ROSE tokens — much like Uniswap Pools!

Ray Reijnders
Are security tokens something that you’re looking into supporting?

Andrew Miller
We can’t comment too much on tokens, but ROSE which is the main token on the Oasis Network, will be used for transaction fees, staking, and delegation at the Consensus Layer.

I’ll add that because of our architecture, different compute environments can create their own tokens that leverage the Oasis Network’s support for confidentiality, it’s scalability, etc. For more information on tokens check out our Token Metrics docs here.

Hillrise Group supports ambitious Web3 startups with early-stage venture capital and fundamental research.

Oasis Labs is building a privacy-first high performance cloud computing platform powered by blockchain technology.

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