Overview
What does the company/project do?
Oasis Labs has the objective to preserve privacy while executing smart contracts. This is important since users are more and more aware of the exploitation of their data by large centralized companies. Blockchain promises a solution for this problem and Oasis Labs wants to provide it so that developers can perform data analytics without disclosing sensitive user information. Eventually developers should be able to use user data for machine learning purposes without violating the highest privacy standards. Despite their data being used it would be impossible to trace back the user data to a given user identity.
What are the tokens used for and how can the token value appreciate?
The tokens on the Oasis Labs network can be used to pay gas fees to miners for the execution of smart contracts. This use case of the token is very similar to Ethereum. As the usage of the network grows the market capitalization of the token will increase subsequently.
How advanced is the project?
Oasis Labs has raised 45 million USD in a private sale. Additionally the team has completed a private testnet. The project has so far received extensive news coverage and was featured in popular tech media outlets such as wired, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review and Venture Beat. This broad amount of news coverage is exceptional at this early stage. Oasis Labs further counts with a significant amount of followers on Twitter and Telegram.
Team
The Oasis Labs team consists of world class researchers and serial entrepreneurs with a solid track record.
Dawn Song is the co-founder and CEO of Oasis Labs. She is a professor of Computer Science at the University of California in Berkeley. She was named as one of the top Innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review and is the most cited scholar in computer security. Additionally she has received a high number of recognized awards and fellowships. Dawn already has previous entrepreneurial experience and she had a successful exit with one of her start ups.
Raymond Cheng is the co-founder and CTO of Oasis Labs. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Washington University and has a solid research record.
Noah Johnson is another co-founder and the CPO of Oasis Labs. Noah is a PhD candidate at Berkely. He has previously been active in the startup world and founded Ensighta Security together with Dawn Song. Their startup got acquired later on. Noah is an expert on security and privacy arquitectures and will contribute his expertise to the team by supervising the product development process.
Bobby Jaros is the last co-founder and the COO of Oasis Labs. He holds a Master degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. He started the company Lookflow that went on to be acquired by Yahoo later on. Additionally he worked in machine learning research positions.
Besides the executive team there are several other people working on Oasis Labs. No advisors have been presented so far.
Product
Oasis Labs believes that even though large data sets are anonymized it will be possible to extract sensitive information from data. However, due to privacy laws and public awareness sensitive information in fact should never be disclosed. The solution that Oasis Labs wants to provide can be summarized as privacy-preserving machine learning. Oasis Labs aims to build libraries that enable developers to build privacy-preserving smart contracts. Oasis Labs technology is based on trusted execution environments as they can be found at the Intel SGX processors. The contract execution should eventually occur in secure enclaves, that keep the information hidden from the rest of the computer.
Strength and Opportunities
Oasis Labs has received venture capital investment from the strongest players in the market. It is impossible to have more prestigious investors. Among them are a16zcrpyto, Binance, Pantera, Polychain, Neo Global Capital and Fred Ehrsam who is a co-founder of Coinbase. The strong links to exchanges is another plus point for Oasis Labs since it is likely to enable timely listing of their token on the most significant exchanges.
Weaknesses and Threats
One of the criticisms of Oasis Labs about established blockchains such as Ethereum is that there is no way to compute sensitive information in a private way. However, several layer two solutions are built on top of Ethereum and other public blockchains that are precisely focussing on this weakness. One of the possible solutions is provided by Keep Network.
Oasis Labs technology depends on the widespread use and adoption of trusted hardware devices. Despite the obvious advantages the technology has also received substantial criticism and comes with disadvantages such as interoperability problems.
Verdict
On the paper Oasis Labs looks like the perfect investment opportunity. The project combines an incredible strong team with the most recognized investors in the cryptocurrency space. Nevertheless, technology entrepreneurship is a highly complex endeavour with an unclear outcome and many unforeseen problems to overcome. The Oasis Labs team has achieved an excellent start but just as for any project there are no guarantees for success. Despite this project scoring better than many other projects at this early stage the risks and uncertainties associated with technology entrepreneurship remain constantly high.
? URL: https://www.oasislabs.com/
? TG: https://t.me/OasisLabs
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* The information contained in this article is for education purpose only and not financial advice. Do your own research before making any investment decisions.
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