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

> 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.

Vague claims to solve the probably-unsolvable - Check.

> Privacy-preserving smart contracts

Heavy Buzzwords - Check

> privacy-preserving machine learning within smart contracts on our platform

Vague mention of ML - Check

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't by itself bad but isn't exactly trust enhancing either. Their staff seems to be all colleagues from previous research work.

This article has more details: https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/09/distributed-ledgeroasis-la...

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.

1. Raised $45 million (!) in pre-sale financing.

2. 'Song says that her project has solved the scaling problem by separating execution from consensus.

“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.”

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.'

I wonder what kind of overhead these architectures have on raw computing power...

Another day, another Decentralized AI Privacy Blockchain project raising a ton of money from people who don't truly understand the intricacies of the problems trying to be solved. What's new?

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..

Didn't even notice Dawn was running this. Well okay then.