Oasis Labs: privacy-first high-performance cloud computing on blockchain

This article has more details: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;09&#x2F;distributed-ledgeroasis-labs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;09&#x2F;distributed-ledgeroasis-la...</a><p>Some highlights from the article are below. Seems like a smart team tackling interesting problems, but as with most projects in this space, raising crazy amounts of money way too early.<p>1. Raised $45 million (!) in pre-sale financing.<p>2. &#x27;Song says that her project has solved the scaling problem by separating execution from consensus.<p>“For each smart contract execution, we randomly select a subset of the computation nodes to form a computation committee, using a proof of stake mechanism. The computation committee executes the smart contract transaction,” Song wrote in an email exchange with TechCrunch. “The consensus committee then verifies the correctness of the computation results from the computation committee. We use different mathematical and cryptographic methods to enable efficient verification of the correctness of the computation results. Once the verification succeeds, the state transition is committed to the distributed ledger by the consensus committee.”<p>By having the computation committee working in parallel with the consensus committee only needing to verify the correctness of the computation creates an easier path to scalability.&#x27;

The research is from Dawn Song&#x27;s lab, and she&#x27;s a established research that has <i>founded</i> entire subfields of computer security.<p>The blockchain space is often full of scams, but you can usually trust stuff backed by academic papers from established folks.

I think this is exciting. I&#x27;m curious whether Oasis is still using SGX in their design (the Ekiden paper seems to be super SGX focused but I&#x27;m unclear as to whether they have moved away from this).<p>Dawn is super smart so it&#x27;s hard to bet against her.<p>Edit: Oh maybe they&#x27;re using some ZK stuff now: &quot;Our platform achieves scalability and integrity with its novel architecture and protocol design, without relying on any trusted hardware or central party. &quot;

How is this different from Enigma, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;enigma.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;enigma.co</a>, which originated at MIT a few years back and did an ICO last year? Enigma already has TEE (they have Intel partnership for that) and sMPC is coming up.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdcast.io&#x2F;e&#x2F;hacksummit-2018&#x2F;12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdcast.io&#x2F;e&#x2F;hacksummit-2018&#x2F;12</a> &lt;&lt; I think they&#x27;re doing SGX, but it&#x27;s hard to tell.

&gt; With its unique combination of capabilities, our platform aims to enable true innovations and new applications that could not be built before. 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.<p>Vague claims to solve the probably-unsolvable - Check.<p>&gt; Privacy-preserving smart contracts<p>Heavy Buzzwords - Check<p>&gt; privacy-preserving machine learning within smart contracts on our platform<p>Vague mention of ML - Check<p>My skepticism is at max here. This is awfully light on any kind of even vague detail and is super dense on meaningless buzzwords. They link out to their own previous research - which isn&#x27;t by itself bad but isn&#x27;t exactly trust enhancing either. Their staff seems to be all colleagues from previous research work.

I really wonder what their actual product is.<p>In the end cloud computing on the blockchain would make cloud computing overly complex with little to no visible benefit. Compute resources in reality are simple as hell, privacy is always first if that is your policy. But privacy comes from process and tech is just a tiny tool for it.<p>Frankly, this so far presents not a single hint of a usable product and reads like some people trying to cash out with questionable buzz.<p>Remember: scientific papers are usually a polar opposite to actual implementations.<p>Think Kubernetes as presented vs. actually running it.

Any blockchain scaling problem can be solved by creating a blockchain centralization problem.

No comment on the software itself, but man, that is one buzz-word filled title.

Another day, another Decentralized AI Privacy Blockchain project raising a ton of money from people who don&#x27;t truly understand the intricacies of the problems trying to be solved. What&#x27;s new?<p>I hate to be so cynical and this teams background does seem solid but I feel the same way when I see this as when the Prince of Nigeria personally reaches out to me for a loan. With all the other failed crypto projects these announcements feel like spam at this point..