Oasis Labs at San Francisco Blockchain Week 2019 and Hackathon
San Francisco Blockchain Week 2019 is over and the Oasis Labs team was super busy, involved, and active throughout the week. This post is a recap of our experience and lessons-learned.
Our Goals
We had a few goals for SFBW:
- As the network moves towards some major milestones, we wanted to create more awareness on platform features and open source code, and the network’s roadmap. We’re especially interested to let people know about our strength in privacy, and the foundation’s efforts to accept node operators, the upcoming staking competition, and new ambassador program.
- Build relationships with those in the blockchain ecosystem.
- Spend a ton of time in the trenches with developers at the DeFi Hackathon. Specifically we wanted to gain a better understanding on what is important to developers; what they care about; what gets them excited; what motivates them; and their viewpoint of community and what participation means to them.
A Busy Week
Here’s our week in tweets and pictures:
Dawn Song presented on Nimble, a new approach to Scalability for the Oasis Network.
Then, later that evening, we participated on a panel with Blockcrafters and Mousebelt, both Korean accelerators.
The next day, we were invited to participate on a panel with other projects, sponsored by Pantera Capital to talk about building blockchain ecosystems.
In partnership with Nervos and other good projects like Parity and Near, we presented a workshop on Rust in Blockchain.
Later that evening, we attended a Coinbase Custody meetup to learn about the good things Coinbase is doing in the space.
Dawn participated on a panel entitled “What grinds my SNARKs”
Later that evening, Oasis hosted a panel exploring the role of privacy in DeFi. We were so fortunate to have a panel comprising all the major areas in the DeFi stack. Panelists included:
- Dawn Song, CEO & Founder of Oasis Labs
- Taylor Monahan, Founder of MyCrypto
- Alex Wearn, Founder of IDEX
- Nevin Freeman, Co-founder, Reserve Protocol
- Teck Chia, Head of Binance X
- Adelyn Zhuo, Head of Marketing at Chainlink
- Jesse Leimgruber, Founder of Bloom.co
And here’s our video of the panel interview —
The DeFi Hackathon
This last weekend was the DeFi Hackathon which is a three-day event that leverages open source software and decentralized networks to transform traditional financial products into trustless and transparent solutions without intermediaries.
There were over 400 participants, about 15 sponsors, and over $60,000 in prize money.
During the weekend, we spent a lot of time with developers and learned about their interest in blockchain, languages they like to develop in, and other platform characteristics they find attractive on which to build.
There were 4 teams that built, to some degree, on the Oasis Network. I want to just go through what two of the teams did and how each utilized Oasis in their project.
Enterprise Wallet
Inspiration: Enterprise companies have a need for top security and, at some point, may have to interact with DeFi assets either personally or in their employment.
Jerome, the developer, built his project using Samsung Knox secure container (TEE) for top security.
This gives the employee a chance to have a crypto wallet on their phone. The company can make rules and policies on the wallet to make sure the employee follows the company’s rules. Monitoring and reporting are pushed back to the company. The wallet can add services like AAVE to deposit crypto.
Jerome built his wallet on Samsung Knox for the security. He used Java and C and no Javascript in order to be most compliant during a security review and certification for the app. He also used Web3j for connection to Ethereum network and Oasis Network. Network for enterprise administration and reposting private data. Oasis lab node running on his server. AAVE smart contract for adding DEFI services in the wallet.
Global Loan Secondary Market Platform
A forum for loan originators, individuals with debt and investors to post, price and exchange pools of loans.
This team was hard at work, 36 hours straight. But they hit several snags along the way and didn’t have a working demo to show. But, they’ve committed to continue building and Oasis is going to stay in touch with them and support them as they build their app.
So, what does their app do? In their words,
Specifically, our tool allows a user, the loan originator or Seller, to:
- Identify a pool to share
- The system calculates the total balance of the pool, weighted average coupon and weighted average remaining term, statistical quartiles for balance, coupon and term
- The pool information is placed in an IPFS location and reference to that pool is hashed on an Ethereum smart contract
- If contacted by a Buyer, the Seller has enough information to follow-up with the Buyer, begin negotiations, and ultimately use smart contract technology to transfer encryption to the Buyer (pending)
The Buyer is able to:
- Choose to evaluate the pool in part by reviewing the pools statistics
- Adjacent to the embedded pricing function, the Buyer can see a pool rating provided by prior bidders and a comment thread covering the participant universe’s thoughts on the quality of the Seller (if known) and the pool itself
- Price the pool using a market rate consider the analytics and the percent to which the pool was attested (note: attestation feature involving third-party contracted auditors by Lender not complete at the time of this submission.)
- Rate and comment on the pool
- Make an offer to the Seller really as a way to communicate interest and begin negotiations
Conclusion
It was a great week and I’m more excited about the potential of the Oasis Network than I have ever been. With our Testnet launching soon and our Mainnet in Q1, we’re hitting our milestones and we’re making active progress on growing the network and adding value to projects in the blockchain ecosystem and to companies outside of blockchain — especially companies that have a need for privacy.
Onward and upward.
