So a strong title needs some strong evidence, which I hope I am able to provide here.
The main reason why the Oasis Network caught my attention is cause of their founder Dawn Song. A brief intro to her so you guys can see why she's so interesting. Dawn Song is the most cited scholar in computer security (her h-index is over 130. An h-index measures productivity and citations) and a part of the Initiative for CryptoCurrency & Contracts (also known as the IC3) I'll include all the links down at the bottom btw. She's worked with google to improve their AI, as well as a focus on adversarial machine learning, to improve the defences of machine learning, due to the fact as technology evolves so does the methods of attacks. What also attracted me to Dawn, outside of her credentials and the respect her work demands from her peers, is that she's clearly a very productive and driven woman, whose primary goal is enabling a responsible and fair data economy. Protocols and chain lead by such people are always a very good long term bet, as they're not driven by material wants such as a lambo or faux respect, like you see with other founders and CEOs. If you want to take the deep dive, check out her google scholar page which I'll link down below.
Also on a quick short note about the IC3; it's an academic focused organisation that are aiming to solve the challenges of blockchain, spearheaded by Ari Juels, the chief scientist of Chainlink (and the co-author of the paper that formulized proof of work in 1999). Challenges such as confidentiality, scaling, interoperability, correctness of code; I'll include a link for that as well down below. But to copy paste it here;
Secure Scaling and Performance: Scaling up blockchains to handle intensive global workloads for both permissionless decentralized blockchains, and
permissioned/consortium blockchains supporting >100,000 transactions/sec.
Correctness by Design and Construction: Making it easy, and even automatic, for blockchain developers to produce secure protocols and code, by utilizing (1) programming
language techniques to create correct code, and (2) cryptographic protocols with security proofs.
Confidentiality: Combining transparency with confidentiality in blockchains, by utilizing (1) cryptographic techniques, as well as (2) trusted-hardware.
Authenticated Data Feeds: Supporting a robust ecosystem of trustworthy data feeds for blockchains and contributing high-trust data feed solutions.
Safety and Compliance: Enabling techniques and protocols for effective monitoring and targeted intervention in blockchains, informed by evaluations of traditional contract
law and risks of crime in smart contracts.
Sound Migration: Formulating practical migration paths to production blockchain deployments and enabling integration of new blockchain systems with legacy systems.
Social Good: Applying cutting-edge blockchain technologies to pressing societal problems in order to illuminate overlooked technical needs and create impactful solutions.
Dawn has multiple papers here published on the IC3's website, some co-authored with the Chainlink team.
So what is the Oasis Network? To put in short terms:
Oasis is a privacy-enabled, layer-1 blockchain network, with high throughput, low gas fees and a secure and modular architecture.
The network has a unique architecture that separates consensus operations from compute into two main layers: the Consensus Layer and ParaTime Layer. This design
allows the Network to support many different parallel compute environments (aka ParaTimes) that can be customized for a broad set of use cases. It's similar to a rollup.
Another explanation is that a ParaTime is its own separate compute environment that can operate as a smart contract environment as well. Hence why Oasis already has
one EVM compatible ParaTime called Emerald, and soon it will have Sapphire, which will be the first confidential smart contract environment on the EVM.
For more information I'll be linking a whitepaper overview, and a link to the whitepaper itself.
It also has some interesting backers such as: Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain, Pantera, Dragonfly, Binance Labs, and several projects already building like the CryptoSafe Alliance with Binance, The BMW Group, Chainlink, Genetica, and Meta (yes, Facebook).
The name of their native token is called ROSE, and yes the token has a utility. It's used for staking, delegation, and for transaction fees both for its consensus layer and its ParaTime layer.
There's a lot more, and I'll be updating this thread to make it more readable, but I'm always up for answering questions, keep in mind I'm not a developer.
The links I talked about;
Dawn Song's google scholar page:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=84WzBlYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=aoInitiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts:
https://www.initc3.org/projects.htmlProof of Work paper:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Proofs-of-Work-and-Bread-Pudding-Protocols-Jakobsson-Juels/1745e5dbdeb4575c6f8376c9e75e70650a7e2e29Whitepaper overview:
https://docdro.id/dn0PG5k (this is a shortened unofficial paper of the whitepaper)
Whitepaper itself:
https://assets.website-files.com/5f59478e350b91447863f593/628ba74a9aee37587419cf65_20200623%20The%20Oasis%20Blockchain%20Platform.pdfMeta's working with Oasis Labs:
https://ai.facebook.com/blog/assessing-fairness-of-our-products-while-protecting-peoples-privacy/