Goals & Purpose

What is the goal of the project?

“…in short, a privacy-first, high-performance cloud computing platform on blockchain. … It is designed to help users leverage and reclaim control of their data, and enable frictionless collaboration between mutually distrusting parties for greater societal good–all without relying on any central party.” – Medium

What problem is the project trying to solve?

Privacy on blockchains.

How do they plan to solve the problem?

Through a module architecture system (each module is called a ParaTime) where devs on Oasis Protocol can create unique dApps using various technologies as they see fit.

ParaTime: “independent parallel runtimes that can use different verifiable computing and confidential computing techniques with little or no changes to the interfaces.” The base ParaTime provides private computation using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) for efficient, cost-effective confidential smart contract execution, and provides verifiable computing via discrepancy detection.

The Consensus layer on Oasis Protocol is a security-focused part of the blockchain that confirms transactions are valid. It’s based on Tendermint, a system using Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), which means it can handle issues like faulty or even malicious nodes without compromising the network’s integrity. The layer also uses Proof of Stake (PoS), where participants lock up some of their tokens to become validators, helping secure the network. Apparently, this mechanism can be changed with relative ease if the dApps building on it prefer to use something else, though it’s not quite clear how that would work other than the smart contract execution is separate from consensus.

Feasibility

Is this a new idea or has it been done before?

Many projects are trying to achieve more private solutions, to varying degrees of success. Uniquely, Oasis claims to be government-compliant, but we’ll have to see how it plays out.

Have they actually created the infrastructure/code/whatever is necessary for this idea, or is it still just an idea?

 It is created and functional.

Do you think other people would buy in?

It has a relatively low market cap and daily trading volume compared to other solutions, though is still in the top 5 of the privacy solutions category on CoinMarketCap as of Q4 2024, but the market cap has been on a slow decline over the past year or so. It doesn’t seem like user adoption is very bullish.

Audit & Security

The project itself has not been audited as of the time of this resesarch, but they do work with auditing companies to audit smart contracts on their network, such as Verilog.