Oasis Network Explained: The Future of Private Finance!

Oasis Network, also known by the ticker ROSE, is a layer-1 blockchain that hopes to create an open, privacy-focused, decentralized financial economy.

Oasis Network aims to open finance beyond traders and early adopters, and to achieve that end has created a blockchain with high throughput and secure architecture, that is globally accessible to anyone with an active internet connection.

Though what makes Oasis Network stand out is that Oasis Network allows you to do so privately, and has enabled a system that allows for a private version of decentralized finance to exist.

But what exactly is Oasis Network, how does it work, and what makes it unique?

Today we find out.

The Oasis Network was founded by Dawn Song in 2018, after having founded Oasis Labs, where the foundational work for Oasis Network would be developed.

The Oasis Network is also run by the Oasis Foundation, a non-profit created from Oasis Labs to facilitate network development without asserting control over the network.

Song herself is a distinguished researcher in blockchains, smart contracts, machine learning, cyber security, and a bunch more respectable and relevant areas of expertise for someone creating a privacy-focused blockchain.

Partially due to Song’s reputation, Oasis Network received early investment from many venture capitalist companies, which included the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Binance, Accel, and many more.

At its core, the Oasis Foundation’s aim for Oasis Network is to create a responsible data society. To this end, Oasis Network grants you full control over your data, who sees it, who it’s shared with, and when.

This allows for the creation of new concepts such as private, or “dark” liquidity pools, private automated market makers, private stablecoins, private oracles, private payments, and pretty much any other crypto functionality you can think of with a privacy feature you can enable.

But, that leads us to how does it all work?

Like many topics we’ve talked about previously, Oasis Network is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain.

To summarize quickly, Proof-of-Stake is an energy-efficient alternative to Bitcoin’s more famous Proof-of-Work.

Instead of making the entire network compete to solve a puzzle, the network instead selects a validator and a few authenticators to validate the incoming transactions.

These validators are selected based on how much they have staked, meaning deposited, to the network.

The benefit of Proof-of-Stake is a massive drop in energy consumption which allows the network to become quicker in processing transactions and more scalable overall than its Proof-of-Work counterpart.

But, for Oasis Network more specifically, their modified version of Proof-of-Stake breaks down into two main components.

The consensus layer, where you find the usual Proof-of-Stake mechanisms, but here also acts as a hub for all the ParaTime layers.

But what are ParaTimes?

The ParaTime layer is unique to Oasis Network and can host multiple parallel runtimes, or “ParaTimes”, each representing a replicated environment with a shared state.

Essentially, each parallel runtime allows the network to scale and process as many transactions as required without congesting the network and slowing down its transaction finalisation time.

To illustrate the concept, think of a video game where the server is full so they create another server. The server is the exact same as the first and is running concurrently with all other servers allowing more players to play, rather than wait in queues to access the server.

So, is that all that makes Oasis Network unique?

What makes Oasis Network unique is the fact it has made confidentiality easy, end-to-end, and for everyone on the network.

It hopes to give users back control over their data and how it is used by creating tokenized versions of our data.

Though what Oasis Network is really trying to achieve is a combination of confidential computing and blockchain technology to create that data tokenization.

This is because blockchain technology allows for logging and enforces compliance with the rules of the blockchain while retaining high integrity and easy to audit.

Then, on the other hand, confidential computing ensures that data remains private during computation and cannot be reused again later without permission.

It is data tokenization that gives the individual control over their data by allowing them to customize the rules in which it is distributed.

Say you want to store the title deeds to your property, but not allow it to be public knowledge, or for the estate agent to reuse that piece of data again, say by selling it to an advertiser looking to sell new homeowner insurance, well, in theory, now you can.

Though, as we all know, projects live and die by their tokenomics. So how does ROSE compare?

Oasis Network’s ROSE token has a capped supply of 10 billion, with 1.5 billion having been made available at launch and the rest to be released slowly over time.

Of this 10 billion total, 23%, or 2.3 billion, will be given out as staking rewards for those who help secure the network over time.

Of the remaining amount, a further 5% will go to strategic partners and reserves. 10% towards the Foundation Endowment which looks after the maintenance of Oasis Network.

Followed by 19% going to Community and Ecosystem, which funds programs to enhance the Oasis Network ecosystem.

20% will be distributed to Core Contributors, and the final 23% will be given to early backers, which mostly consists of those who had invested in the project before the mainnet launch in 2018.

The distribution of these remaining funds is released slowly and predictably over a 10-year duration. This is to avoid a large number of ROSE tokens entering the market at once and suppressing their value.

Like most Proof-of-Stake tokens, its main purposes are paying for network transactions, staking for rewards, and governance of the protocol itself.

In reality, if blockchain technology is to be integrated into our day-to-day lives, it is going to need a privacy feature.

If blockchains are immutable, then who can view the data needs to be controllable.

Oasis Network solves a very important problem within the crypto space, and if it can continue to build on its foundations, it may become a force to reckon with over time.

Though, as always, nothing is guaranteed in crypto, of course.