Oasis 101: a platform for DeFi and a data economy

pothu
4 min readApr 14, 2022

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The Oasis Network enables secure and private data-sharing and control. Oasis prioritizes applications and use-cases that promote data privacy and user confidentiality. It’s designed to function as a privacy-preserving platform for open finance, and to use data responsibly.

Crypto isn’t as anonymous as it seems. Your crypto address isn’t connected to your irl identity., but it’s possible to analyze transaction histories and identify people. Moreover, transactions aren’t private and can be viewed by anyone. Transparency and openness are central to the crypto ethos, but everyone wants privacy and doesn’t want to share all their info. Moreover, in some aspects of finance, privacy isn’t essential. As crypto becomes more mainstream, privacy is going to be key. Oasis is an L1 that introduces this privacy to the blockchain world.

Oasis prioritizes applications and use-cases that promote privacy. Oasis supports private smart contracts. This enables data to remain private even while it’s being processed. Private smart contracts also enable the creation of a new generation of decentralized applications. Applications that see privacy as an incentive to create trust with their users.

Confidential smart contracts are possible on Oasis because of confidential ParaTimes. ParaTimes are runtime environments that represent computation in a shared state. In a confidential ParaTime, nodes are required to use a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) that acts as a secure enclave for smart contract execution.

The state and transaction details are private, which prevent malicious players from gaming the system. The end-to-end encryption unlocks potential DeFi use-cases such as under-collateralized lending and prevention of front/back running.

Developers have the flexibility to keep data public or confidential, which allows DeFi dApps to comply with regulations while ensuring the protection of commercial interests and participation of financial institutions in the system. This means that all sorts of dApps are possible on Oasis.

Oasis’ privacy features have created Tokenized Data. Tokenized Data is a new type of digital asset that enables users to take control of the data they generate. Users are able to stake their data with applications and earn rewards. This creates an incentivized data economy.

Data providers on the network can earn rewards using their tokenized data by staking their data with apps. They still maintain complete control over how their private information is consumed by the services they use. Binance, Chainlink, BMW Group, Balancer have already started building applications that make use of tokenized data.

Privacy is great, but to become the go-to DeFi platform, a chain has to be scalable and fast. Oasis is extremely fast and scalable. It can handle 1000 TPS, and transaction fees are extremely low. Moreover, Oasis is built to be scalable. Oasis Network’s scalability is achieved by separating its consensus and computational operation. They’re separated into the consensus layer and ParaTime layer:

Consensus Layer: Delegated PoS consensus algorithm run by a set of validators that secures network.

ParaTime Layer: An environment that hosts many parallel runtimes that have a shared state.

The consensus layer separation gives oasis the flexibility to support multiple customizable runtimes.

ROSE Tokenomics: About two billion ROSE tokens will be paid out as inflation rewards to stakers and delegators for contributing resources to the network. Every epoch, a node needs to sign at least 75% to be eligible for staking rewards.

Oasis has some great features:

  • Query & Data Control: Companies can control access to their data. They can place detailed restrictions and Structured Query Language queries.
  • Data Collaboration: Businesses can share sensitive data. This allows for large volumes of capital.
  • Parcel SDK: makes it easy to build dApps on Oasis.

Oasis has also launched a grants program to incentivize developers to build new dApps, DeFi protocols, privacy-first products and integrations on top of the network. Applicants are eligible to receive anywhere from $5K–$50K in ROSE tokens.

The Oasis Network is doing a lot of great things. It’s fast, scalable, and the privacy features unlock a lot of new use cases. Oasis is designed to function as a privacy-preserving platform for open finance, and to use data responsibly. There are other great privacy chains like AZERO and SCRT, but what sets Oasis apart is the way it’s seamlessly turned data into a yield-earning commodity through the tokenization of data.

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pothu

Multi-chain maxi. Follow me to learn about NFTs, DeFi, and Crypto.