Figment’s First Look: The Oasis Network

The Oasis Network is an upcoming privacy-first decentralized computing network. Figment will be supporting the Oasis Foundation and its stakeholders at launch. Until then, learn more about what makes the Oasis Network unique by reading below. 

What is the Oasis Network?

The Oasis Network is a new, layer one, Proof of Stake platform that enables the tokenization of data, which will give ownership of data back to individuals. The Oasis Network is built with three key principles in mind: 

• Privacy-First Design - End-to-end confidentiality and true data ownership will be supported by the Oasis Network. Compute techniques like Intel SGX’s secure enclave will be leveraged to ensure that data is not exposed on the network. The protocol can also support other privacy preserving technology such as Homomorphic encryption and Zero-knowledge proofs.
• Resilient, Flexible Architecture - The Oasis Network is designed to support a broad range of use cases without having to go through hard-forks or large network updates. This will ensure that it can retain its utility in the long term. 
• Real-World Performance - The Oasis Network separates computation from consensus. This will allow the network to handle more complex computations while avoiding computational backlog.

Use Cases

The Oasis Network has the potential to bring new industries such as healthcare, traditional finance, and human resources into the public blockchain space. 

Many current blockchains like Ethereum, store all data and state of the chain publicly. This allows any user to access the data which limits the ability for sensitive data to be stored on or transferred through these blockchains.

The Oasis Network plans to solve this problem with a top-to-bottom solution by providing data confidentiality at the platform level, and privacy primitives at the application level. This will solve compliance and regulatory issues for developers while allowing users to regain control of their data. 

What’s Being Built

Oasis Labs is already building products, tools, and integrations on top of the Oasis Network for companies and organizations looking for privacy solutions.

• Query & Data Control - An end-to-end solution that allows companies to monitor and control access to their data, and create restrictions on queries.
  
• Data Collaboration - Tooling for businesses to share sensitive data with other organizations while being able to retain and adjust data access and permissions.
  
• User Privacy-as-a-Service - An integration that gives users of consumer products and applications the ability to control what data is being shared, and how it can be used.
  
• The Parcel SDK - A self-service SDK that allows developers to easily access the Oasis Network to build their own privacy data tools and applications. 

In addition to Oasis Labs, there are a number of other projects building applications on top of the Oasis Network today. Here are just a few:

• Genomics Company - A direct-to-consumer genome sequencing company is leveraging the Oasis Network to give their customers complete control over how their genome data is used. They plan to launch publicly later this year.
• Pharmaceutical Analytics - A healthcare software company is leveraging the Oasis Network’s privacy-preserving technology to run predictive analytics on pharmaceutical data.
• Mortgage Providers - A mortgage broker uses the Oasis Network to help homeowners automatically reduce monthly mortgage payments when neighborhood home values fall, while protecting their privacy.

Network Architecture

The Oasis Network uses Tendermint as its consensus algorithm. Similar to Cosmos, the validator set size is capped at 100, and participation is based on the amount of tokens staked. Validators on the Oasis Network will be able to sign blocks, earn transaction fees, receive staking rewards, stake, and receive delegations.

As mentioned before, the Oasis Network separates consensus and compute, thus improving network throughput and scalability. This will also allow developers to add their own customized runtime called ParaTimes on the Oasis Network. Runtime developers will have to deposit tokens on the network to reserve a spot and pay for transaction fees. Runtime developers will be able to specify conditions for nodes wanting to compute their runtime like requiring a trusted execution environment. 

Staking on the Oasis Network

Validators on the Oasis Network can self-stake network tokens and accept delegations from other token holders to their validator. 

Reward Rate

The Oasis Network will target a ~15% annual reward rate for validators at launch. This rate will gradually decrease to 10% by the end of the year. Rewards will be fixed and proportional to amount staked. Validators only receive rewards in each epoch if they sign at least 75% of blocks within that epoch. 

Slashing

At launch, the Oasis Network will only slash validators for double signing. Validators who double sign will be slashed 100 tokens and the validator will be frozen, which means they will stop earning rewards until the validator is unfrozen. The Oasis Network will not slash validators for downtime at launch. 

Unbonding Period

The Oasis Network will have a ~14 day unbonding period. During this time, staked tokens will not earn rewards, but they will still be at risk of being slashed.

The Oasis Network Token

The Oasis Network token, which is yet to be named, will be used:

• To pay for transaction fees.
• As a deposit to secure runtime space.
• As a reward token for validators and delegators.

Governance

Anyone interested in the Oasis Network can join the community, contribute to the project design, and participate in the decision making process. 

All non-sensitive project management discussion will take place in the Oasis Network GitHub.

A policy of lazy consensus will be in effect in order to streamline future developments. This will ensure that the Oasis Network is not bogged down by endless discussion and continual voting. 

Essentially, as long as no one is vocally against a proposal or patch, the proposal or patch will be recognized as having support from the community.

Community members have a 72 hour window to object to a proposal. If this happens, votes will be cast using comments in the pull request. The proposal will either be accepted or rejected by a simple majority vote.

Future Developments

Future features will be determined by the community more broadly but features that the Oasis Foundation is likely to propose include:

• Extending token utility across runtimes
• On-Chain governance
• Fast sync
• Network interoperability / bridges to other networks

The Oasis Network is currently testing its Amber Network, a release candidate for mainnet.

Mainnet launch of the Oasis Network is expected to happen this year. More information on the Oasis Network can be found at the Oasis Foundation’s website.