Oasis: A Privacy-First Smart Contract Platform

The internet has fundamentally changed our lives, but along with the many benefits, what kinds of challenges has it created?

For Dawn Song, founder and CEO of Oasis Labs, the issues of security and privacy are a top priority. She and her team of world renowned, top security researchers and professors from Berkeley and MIT are developing new technologies to address many of these challenges.

Listen to learn how Oasis could radically change how our personal data is secured and shared, eliminate data silos, and enable developers to build privacy-preserving applications without specialized knowledge or expertise in privacy and security.

The Importance of Privacy

Security and privacy are a big concern for most of us. We continue to see large-scale security breaches in which companies are losing data for hundreds of millions of users at a time, and almost everyone has been affected.

To solve this problem, Oasis is building a privacy-first smart contract platform. Oasis will combine secure software and hardware to enable privacy-preserving smart contracts that are both highly scalable and secure.

Eliminating Data Silos

We have a lot of valuable data. One example is our medical data, but it is very difficult for medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies to gain access to medical data to help them conduct medical research, find better cures for diseases, and prolong life.

Oasis wants to protect users and data privacy, and also at the same to extract value out of data, which means eliminating unused data silos and creating data enablement--enabling new applications and new capabilities that have never before been possible.

Empowering Developers

Another one of Oasis’ main goals is to make it easy for developers to build privacy-preserving applications without the expertise and specialized knowledge of a security or privacy expert.

Rather than spending the time to become experts, for example, on learning how to use secure hardware, developers can focus on building their smart contract, and they can specify their desired security and privacy requirements.

Key takeaways:

In addition to scaling limitations, one of the primary concerns around today’s general purpose smart contracting platforms is the lack of privacy-- preserving technologies;
Oasis is a software and hardware platform that will have improved scalability and privacy-preserving smart contracts;
Privacy-preserving smart contracts that scale have the potential to eliminate data silos by improving the coordination and access controls around - our most sensitive digital user data.