Oasis Labs

Oasis Labs aims to give people control over their data with privacy and security protections along with the delivery of higher processing capabilities. Oasis has hardware and software technologies that enable cloud-scale, real-world applications such as machine learning on blockchain.

Oasis Labs founders include Dawn Song (CEO), Bobby Jaros (COO), Noah Johnson (CPO) and Raymond Cheng (CTO).

Dawn Song is a Professor in Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley with research interests in deep learning and security. Noah Johnson is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley and his advisor is Dawn Song. Johnson has experience in security policy enforcement and privacy-preserving techniques. His research has been used by Uber. Song and Johnson commercialized their DroidBlaze platform and founded Ensighta Security, acquired by FireEye in 2012.

Bobby Jaros previously was CEO of Lookflow, acquired by Yahoo in 2013 to power image search at Flickr. Jaros has a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford and MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He worked in machine learning at Yahoo Labs, principle investing at Goldman Sachs and strategy at Nokia.

Raymond Cheng is a research scientist, open source software developer and blockchain lecturer. Cheng contributed to a networking project that was productionized by Google into Outline. Cheng has a PhD in Computer Science from University of Washington and degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

The company developed the smart contracts platform Ekiden. In their smart contract system design Oasis Labs aims to overcome limitations in the capacity of the network and confidentiality. This would allow health-care organizations to use blockchains to share patient medical information with researchers in a way that allows users to selectively give access to data. Oasis Labs separates smart-contract execution from blockchain consensus which will make it possible to keep data confidential while using it to train a machine-learning model. The company uses a secure enclave, which is an isolated piece of hardware that acts like a black box keeping the computation private from the computer’s other applications, the operating system and the owner. Cryptographic proof that the programs were executed correctly goes on the blockchain.

The Keystone Project is an academic initiative led by researchers from UC Berkeley and MIT and includes joint development with Oasis Labs and other institutions. The Keystone Project open-sourced its secure enclave framework in December 2018. Keystone utilizes RISC-V based hardware which will be deployed as real RISC-V chips and is designed to be a general research platform for secure hardware innovation.

Oasis Labs partnered with other crypto and venture capital companies to launch a blockchain tech hub called Oasis Startup Hub, which was announced in October 2018. Partners include Andressen Horowitz’s a16z crypto, Accel, Binance Labs, Pantera Capital and Polychain Capital. The companies plan to provide guidance to help developers build “privacy-first” decentralized applications (DApps) using Oasis Lab’s protocol.

Oasis announced in July 2018 that it raised $45 million from investors including a16z Crypto, Pantera Capital, Accel and Binance.

To date, there are 1.5 billion Oasis Network ROSE tokens in circulation, and the total amount of ROSE that has been issued is 10 billion tokens. Tokens are distributed according to the following principle. 23.5% goes towards staking rewards. 23% allocated for supporters. 5% is given to strategic partners and to the reserve. 18.5% goes to the community and ecosystems. 10% is donated to the foundation, and the last 20% goes to the main participants. 2.3 billion tokens will be automatically paid out as rewards to members and delegates for securing the network for ten years. ROSE is used for transaction fees, staking, and delegation at the consensus level. By staking ROSE, users can secure the Oasis blockchain and earn up to 20% reward per year.