Decentralising the web’s infrastructure with Oasis Network
Our world is becoming increasingly connected, and with a big part of our lives being online, our data, credentials and other confidential information are inevitably ending up in the wrong hands.
The general public has become increasingly aware of their right to data privacy and in exerting caution when giving out information to 3rd parties. Nevertheless, whilst the importance of only giving data to the right people can’t be understated, the majority of the internet’s infrastructure is run by a small group of cloud provider companies, handling, and gate-keeping data and the availability of their platforms.
Simply VC strives to support the development of platforms driven by a strong belief in the vision of a future where decentralised organisations, currencies, economies and networks form the backbone of a better, more egalitarian society. In this regard, over the past few months we’ve participated in Oasis Network’s private testnets, an up-and-coming decentralised cloud computing platform with a focus on data privacy.
Decentralising the web
Ethereum
Ethereum’s rise as a decentralised platform, away from the data-harvesting oversight of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, brought advantages in censorship-resistance and operation away from centralised control, being able to run applications in such an environment.
However, over time, some real-world use drawbacks seemed apparent. The main restriction was with the computational bandwidth of the network, being the execution cost and speed of smart contracts running on the platform. Moreover, any and all data transacted between users, smart contracts and their executions is public record and available to anyone querying the blockchain.
Oasis
Oasis Labs’ work is focused on the ability to run computationally intensive applications on a blockchain with end-to-end privacy, achieving both availability and confidentiality through the following features:
- transaction and smart contract execution data being isolated and kept confidential in trusted execution environments
- horizontal scaling by having compute nodes divided into subsets, with each of these processing different transaction groups in parallel
Privacy
Full stack privacy is achieved by encrypting data on transmission, and only having that data decryptable by the entity permissioned to access it.
Smart contracts are executed within the trusted execution environment of compute nodes. This type of smart contract execution boasts the following properties:
- Isolation: This ensures that the owners of the compute nodes do not have access to data being worked on, which should only be interpreted by the contract itself, and not the node or any other 3rd party. This environment has it’s own cryptographic keys, which are completely independent from the node operator, enabling data inputs and outputs being encrypted.
- Remote attestation: providing clear evidence to the rest of the network on the validity of the smart contract execution within the secure enclave.
Scalability
Oasis has come up with a new approach to scalability. Pending transactions are grouped and dispatched for execution to different groups of compute nodes. By having multiple groups of compute nodes executing different groups of transactions in parallel, horizontal scaling is achieved.
Developer tools
Having both WASM and EVM runtimes means those familiar with Ethereum can easily port existing Solidity contracts. Check out the Oasis developer documentation to gain a quick start and learn how to deploy on the current Oasis devnet.
The Oasis Public Testnet
We’re excited to be participating in the first Oasis Public Testnet which was launched this week, and encourage all node operators to join the network, participate in the community and also possibly earn rewards!
Read Oasis’ official announcement: The Oasis Public Testnet is live
Stay tuned to Simply Staking for more Oasis related articles and documentation:
- Website: https://simply-vc.com.mt
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimplyStaking
- Telegram: https://t.me/SimplyVC
Feel free to contact me with any questions or feedback here:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/cremonafran
