The Genesis of the Oasis Foundation
Community Translations: Portuguese | Russian | Serbian |Filipino
It all started when we envisioned a new paradigm in which people can actually control their data while having the option to obtain value from it and even monetizing it. Oasis Network was born to change the current status quo and the team, driven by this vision, worked to build the protocol to life and empower its users.
How is Oasis different from other Layer-1 blockchains out there?
How often do you click “accept” on a website without even thinking about it? Personal data has become one of the modern world’s most valuable commodities, yet we are giving our data away for free without even realizing it. Our data gets copied, sold and passed between companies and platforms in a seemingly uncontrollable way. A particular data point could become fuel for Facebook’s ad algorithms, get snapped up by data brokers, or sit idly on your device. Once shared, our data gets collected and stored on centralized computers that can be vulnerable to attack by malicious third parties.
Imagine a world where you not only have complete control over your online private information, freely choosing to grant or withhold access to it, but you also earn an income from your data when you choose to share it with businesses. That world is closer to reality than you think, thanks to the Oasis Network!
Oasis is the first privacy-enabled blockchain platform revolving around three unique elements: privacy, data tokenization, and scalability
Privacy
The Oasis Network is a privacy-first layer-1 blockchain with built-in features designed to support confidential smart contracts. Since data is never leaked to the node operator or application developer, sensitive information (social security numbers, health records) can be safely used by blockchain apps on the Oasis Network. This is something incredibly risky on other Layer-1 blockchains.
Data Tokenization: Get paid for your data!
The Oasis Network can allow users to preserve the value of their data by enabling selective sharing. Oasis can power private, scalable DeFi. Its unique privacy features allows individuals to maintain data rights and be paid for third party use of their data, all while retaining control and privacy. “Without enforcement of [data property rights], anyone can take data and derive value from it without attributing value back to the original owners” says Jernej Kos.
Scalability
The Oasis architecture separates execution from consensus, enabling complex transactions to be processed much faster with parallel execution across many ParaTimes. Powerful new features like sophisticated discrepancy detection makes Oasis more efficient than sharding and parachains — requiring a smaller replication factor for the same level of security.
The Genesis of Oasis Foundation
The Oasis community has grown remarkably fast since its 2018 beginnings and in order to be able to bring to life its vision of building a responsible data economy, it’s critical that the network maintains its decentralized roots and design. An ever-growing number of participants are joining the Oasis ecosystem and providing continuous research and development. By giving the power to the Oasis community members, we are further decentralizing the Oasis Network in every sense of the word. It will be able to grow and expand on a global scale. Of course, the evolution of Oasis requires coordinating between network participants, fostering communications between various groups, and providing a forum for new initiatives to be proposed, acted upon and led by the community. The Oasis Foundation was founded to help address this challenge — to help the Oasis community communicate, coordinate, and work together in developing a powerful, decentralized privacy-enabled blockchain.
Oasis Foundation: principles and activities
The Oasis Foundation was created with the purpose of coordinating and fostering a global community around the Oasis ecosystem. The mission of the Oasis Foundation is to promote the empowerment, governance and decentralization of the Oasis Protocol and its ecosystem. The Foundation is, in fact, independent from Oasis Labs, and has a much broader vision.
The Foundation’s guiding principle is that if the community is allowed to independently drive innovation, the scope of ideas will exceed that which can be created through the top-down control of one company or government. At its core, the Oasis Foundation is a not-for-profit organization, comprised of an international team with members in Europe, Asia and North America.
The Oasis Foundation’s main activities are expected to include:
○ Supporting and bringing people together to build vibrant and creative communities
○ Facilitating and funding various community-driven activities (grants, hackathons, etc.)
○ Expanding communities into global regions
○ Promoting the transparency, governance and decentralization of the Oasis Network
○ Driving awareness, educating and ensuring that everyone is informed about ongoing activities, product features and projects
Besides the technical resources and support that the Oasis Foundation provides, the financial support side includes a balance of grant funding (for projects, teams or communities unable to support themselves) and possibly also participatory funding (e.g. incubation, acceleration and traditional investment). To that end, the Oasis Foundation needs to raise the awareness of the new suite of developer tools and the problems they solve among end users, developers, regulators, governments, businesses and beyond. This explicitly includes empowering local communities to host meetups, run workshops, organize hackathons, write documentation and otherwise do whatever it takes to help bring new participants into the ecosystem and up to speed. This is an emphatically collaborative effort across a wide range of entities that make up the ecosystem.
The Oasis Foundation team
At the core of the Oasis Foundation is an international team of experts hailing from across Europe, Asia and North America. The foundation’s technical team is led by a Technical Advisory Committee, whose core responsibility is to advise the Oasis Foundation and the ecosystem participants on the technical aspects of the Oasis Network.
TAC members:
Additional Oasis Foundation team members
- Borivoj Kos, Director of Operations
- Jorge Cueto, Product Manager and Developer Relations
- Peter Us, Core Platform Engineer
- Jon Poole, Community Manager
- Ekin Tuna, Business Development Manager
How it all started: From technological innovation to real-world applications
One of the earliest technical contributors to the technologies underlying Oasis Network, Oasis Labs, was founded in 2018 by Dawn Song, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the world’s foremost experts in computer security and trustworthy artificial intelligence. Dawn and a number of early contributors to the technologies underlying the Oasis Network envisioned a new paradigm in which people control their data while allowing data to be used in a privacy-preserving way and obtaining value from it. Prof. Song saw blockchain as a powerful source for good, but essential elements she felt it lacked were privacy protection and scalability.
The Oasis Labs team is still hard at work, focusing on supporting their privacy product (Parcel) and a range of enterprise use cases. As an active member of the Oasis Ecosystem, Oasis Labs works alongside other projects and teams to help the growth of the Oasis Network. This means collaborating with the Oasis Foundation to support the development of additional features and technologies that can improve the network as a whole and their various projects. The Oasis Labs team is also continuing to research and develop new privacy technology and is working with enterprise partners to deploy these and other blockchain solutions within their stack.
Reach out via our official channels:
