Oasis Foundation

The Oasis Foundation has developed the Oasis Network, a blockchain platform for open finance. The Oasis Network is built on high-throughput and security-oriented architecture to enable private and scalable decentralized finance operations on the mass-market level. Its privacy features let users create a new type of digital asset via tokenization so they can take control of the data they generate and earn rewards for staking it with applications.

According to the Oasis Foundation, the organization's main activities include the following:

• Supporting and bringing people together to build creative communities
• Facilitating and funding various community-driven activities (through grants, hackathons, etc.)
• Promoting transparency, governance, and the decentralization of the Oasis Network
• Promoting awareness, spreading blockchain knowledge, and ensuring that the community is informed about ongoing activities, product features, and projects

The Oasis Network is divided into two main components, the Consensus Layer and the ParaTime Layer. The Consensus Layer is a scalable, high-throughput, secure, proof-of-stake consensus powered by a decentralized set of validator nodes. The ParaTime Layer hosts many parallel runtimes called ParaTimes—each representing a replicated compute environment with shared state.

Through the separation of the ParaTime and the Consensus layers, multiple ParaTime runtimes can process transactions in parallel, meaning complex workloads processed on one ParaTime will not affect the processing speed of simpler transactions on another.

The network’s discrepancy detection features are implemented to make the Oasis Network more efficient than sharding and parachains, since, according to the Oasis Foundation, they require a smaller replication factor (RF) to achieve an equal level of security.

In a confidential ParaTime environment, nodes are required to use a type of computing technology called a trusted execution environment (TEE), which functions accordingly with the "black box" computing model to execute smart contracts. This process ensures that data remains private and is never leaked to the node operator or application developer.

According to the Oasis Foundation, its network's confidentiality enables the possibility of a range of new blockchain use cases by allowing personal or sensitive data, such as the user's social security number, bank statements, or health information, to be used by apps on the network. Normally, this kind of sensitive information would be put at risk on other Layer 1 networks.

Each ParaTime can be isolated from other runtime environments and developed to match the requirements of a specific application. The size and accessibility settings of ParaTimes can also be adjusted, depending on whether a use case necessitates more rapid or more secure execution.

Nodes can be required to have specific hardware, such as secure enclaves in a confidential ParaTime. Each ParaTime can run distinct Runtime virtual machines (ParaTime engines), such as an ethereum virtual machine (EVM) backwards-compatible engine, a smart contract language based on Rust (programming language), or a data tokenization engine.

ParaTimes can be made permissioned or permissionless (open or closed), making the platform suitable for enterprise and developer use cases. This enables users to have their own closed ParaTime or a fully decentralized, open ParaTime runtime environments.