Ethereum Support on the Oasis Network with Second State’s New ParaTime
Second State announces the development of an Ethereum Compatible ParaTime in development for the Oasis Network. Will launch in Q3 2020.
Today in an Oasis Community AMA, the team at Oasis and I announced that Second State is collaborating with the Oasis Foundation to bring its next-gen virtual machine technology to the Oasis Network in the form of an Oasis Network ParaTime. The goal is to enable all existing Ethereum smart contracts and DApps, including DeFi and DEX apps, to run on the Oasis Network.
The Second State VM (SSVM) is a fully-featured Ethereum WebAssembly (Ewasm) Virtual Machine. It is the next-gen runtime for the Ethereum 2.0 ecosystem and is also supported by the Polkadot, CyberMiles, Ethereum Classic, and other public blockchains. On the Oasis Network, the SSVM Ewasm runtime will operate in parallel along other ParaTimes connected to the Oasis Network and provide an easy-to-use development environment for smart contracts written in Solidity, YUL, Vyper, Rust, and other common blockchain programming languages. The SSVM is also a powerful runtime for general cloud computing applications. Using SSVM, developers will be able to deploy smart contracts on the Oasis Network using programming languages and toolchains they are already familiar with.
SSVM will launch as a Public Testnet the week of August 17 and will be available to developers everywhere in Q3. The first iteration of SSVM will support non-confidential smart contracts, but we plan to add support for confidential smart contracts to leverage the Oasis Network’s privacy-preserving features.
A New Era of Privacy Computing
Data is often said to be the most valuable asset in the Internet era. Yet, big data without privacy is dangerous and harmful to society. Recently, Facebook was fined $5 billion for the Cambridge Analytica data abuse scandal. Privacy concerns could severely hamper the value of big data.
Privacy-related incidents and regulations have made us reluctant to share data. It is especially problematic in industries with highly valuable and sensitive user data, such as Artificial Intelligent (AI) and healthcare. The COVID-19 Pandemic has prompted the urgency in data sharing with privacy, due to emerging applications such as telemedicine, contact tracing, immunization passports, and AI-assisted drug discovery.
People talk about data like it’s the new oil. But data is actually crude oil. You need to process it to turn it into something that’s useful and valuable. — Dr. Dawn Song, Founder of Oasis Labs, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
Sharing data across silos is essential for deriving insights and making data a valuable asset.
For example, the rise of deep learning in AI has spiked the demand for big data. AI algorithms perform better and create more value when trained with large quantities of diverse data. However, due to privacy concerns, people are increasingly reluctant to hand over their data to companies to train AI models, especially when those companies can profit from the AI models while data contributors do not.
Besides AI, data privacy concerns have been stopping us from adopting cloud computing. While public clouds such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure promise to improve enterprise operations, they also pose huge privacy challenges. Cloud computing providers can access data from clients and could “be evil.” Furthermore, technical solutions, such as firewalls, cannot guarantee those centralized servers’ data security.
Privacy Computing in the Real World
Privacy computing is an emerging approach to software development and data management. It allows users to compute on a collection of data sets without direct access to the original data.
The Oasis Foundation is building a decentralized privacy computing network that leverages a type of privacy computing called Trusted Execution environments. With its rapid speed and privacy-preserving design, the Oasis Network can enable not only better, faster open finance but open data that can be transferred, programmed and owned like other digital assets on the blockchain.
The Oasis Network achieves its flexible design and fast transaction speeds by separating consensus operations and execution. This allows multiple execution environments (called ParaTimes) to operate in parallel, submitting batches of transactions to the Consensus Layer which maintains an immutable, decentralized ledger. ParaTimes can be built, deployed, and run by anyone, and can be easily customized. This allows the Oasis Network to serve the needs of almost any use case for a decentralized network without compromising on performance.
Second State is excited to be partnering with the Oasis Foundation to build an EVM compatible ParaTime on the Oasis Network. Second State is a leader in open-source infrastructure software for cloud computing and blockchains. As part of our work with the Foundation, Second State will create a compute engine, smart contract runtime, and developer tools for an EVM compatible, WASI-based ParaTime connected to the Oasis Network. The Second State Virtual Machine (SSVM) is based on the industry-standard WebAssembly, specially optimized for server-side and blockchain applications. SSVM is the best-performing WebAssembly implementation on the market. At the same time, through Second State’s LLVM-based compiler toolchain, developers can use Solidity, YUL, Vyper, Rust, and other common blockchain programming languages to write functions and contracts that run on Second State ParaTime.
To learn more about the Oasis Network go to oasisprotocol.org or documentation at docs.oasis.dev.
