Oasis Labs is presenting a new privacy-first, high performance cloud computing platform on blockchain

Welcome to The Stack CafeTM — Oasis Labs is an interesting new project in the blockchain stack.  Apparently, Oasis Labs is presenting a new privacy-first, high performance cloud computing platform on blockchain.    We will try to provide a very brief overview of this new addition to the blockchain stack.

In Oasis Labs own words:

Oasis is “building a new computing platform that enables cloud-scale, real-world applications with decentralized trust and privacy protection…”

Key contact points for Oasis Labs (including Keystone and RISC-V):

Some of the key components that Oasis Labs is offering:

  • Privacy-preserving smart contracts (security and privacy)
  • High-performance for real-world complex applications
  • Rich programming framework support such as privacy-preserving machine learning within smart contracts on our platform

Oasis Labs new blockchain platform is called Ekiden.  Ekiden is a platform/system that can use any desired underlying blockchain system (permissioned or permissionless) with TEE (trusted execution environment) based execution (See Keystone and RISC-V below for enhanced open source options on TEE based execution and open source) which is anchored cryptographically.  Eikden also appears to be agnostic to consensus layer mechanics (only need blockchain compute nodes) and can scale consensus and compute nodes independently based on the need (performance & security).

As touched on above, Oasis Labs has structured its platform so it is not locked into the use of proprietary hardware (e.g., TEE like Intel SGX).  Apparently, Oasis Labs Ekiden platform is exploring some open source projects to use in its product (the trusted hardware and attestation aspects e.g. trusted execution environment hardware like Intel SGX).  The open source projects mentioned in the Ekiden platform and most likely might be available to use with Ekiden are called Keystone and RISC-V.  

Keystone is an open-source project for building trusted execution environments (TEE) with secure hardware enclaves, based on the RISC-V architecture. Our goal is to build a secure and trustworthy open-source secure hardware enclave, accessible to everyone in industry and academia.

RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computing (RISC) principles.

In other words, instead of only being able to use Intel SGX (tee architecture), Oasis Labs does state that any comparable TEE with attestation capabilities could be used e.g., Keystone, RISC-V.  By using Open source projects and potential incorporation into Ekiden, Oasis Labs has opened the door to a more robust and resilient architecture for its blockchain stack.

This is another interesting project for the blockchain stack and should provide for some great use cases.  Go check out Oasis Labs and, if you are a developer, sign-up for the private test-net and start using and developing for it.  We will try and provide updates to Oasis Labs.

Thanks again for visiting The Stack CafeTM and we look forward to hearing from you.

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