Oasis Labs Blockchain Cloud Computing Raises $45 Million, Lead By a16zcrypto & Binance

Oasis Labs has announced it has raised $45 million from several investors to design a platform to overcome performance, security and privacy limitations that have hampered blockchain adoption to date.

The investors are a16zcrypto, Accel, Binance, DCVC (Data Collective), Electric Capital, Foundation Capital, Metastable, Pantera, Polychain, and more.

Oasis Labs is founded by a team of academic and entrepreneurial leaders. The company has garnered investment support from a wide spectrum of the blockchain ecosystem including venture capital, crypto funds and hardware manufacturers.

We are excited to introduce Oasis Labs! We’re building a privacy-first, high-performance cloud computing platform on blockchain. Learn more and join us! https://t.co/a3MBEEQbby pic.twitter.com/VQTfmogSoA

— Oasis Labs (@OasisLabs) July 9, 2018

What Oasis Labs Is Doing Differently

Jake Flomenberg, partner at Accel said although today's internet is experiencing significant growing pains when it comes to providing effective security and privacy protections, which is only compounded by the rise of data-intensive services like AI; at the same time, however, the opportunity has never been greater to responsibly leverage data in the web's next phase of products and innovation.

He said Oasis Labs is forging a new path by giving people control over their data while delivering a high-performance blockchain platform that will reshape the future of the cloud.

To power those applications, the Oasis platform embodies two core values. The first is bringing privacy and security protections previously not possible on a blockchain. The second is delivering processing capabilities that have orders of magnitude greater performance than existing systems, even for complex applications. This combination enables sophisticated, computationally-intensive and privacy-sensitive services such as machine learning on the blockchain.

It's exciting to see talented people like Dawn and her team working on ways to transition the internet away from data silos and towards a world with more responsible ways to share and own your data, said Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase and Oasis Labs investor.

Banking On The Blockchain Revolution

Blockchains are poised to revolutionize much of the way we live, but many developers and organizations have understandable concerns about performance and privacy limitations that are currently hindering their ability to embrace the technology, said Dr. Dawn Song, CEO of Oasis Labs.

She said the Oasis platform aims to help users leverage and reclaim control over their data, and at the same time deliver superior performance and privacy capabilities. The company said its goal is to build the scalable and secure decentralized internet that puts users first.

Starting today, Oasis Labs is welcoming developers to apply for access to their private testnet. Its team has been hard at work building the platform for blockchain's most meaningful applications, said Oasis Labs co-founder and CTO Raymond Cheng.

The Oasis Labs team is led by CEO Dawn Song, a MacArthur Fellow, Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley, and ranked as the most cited scholar in computer security. The founding team has previously led three successful startups, focused on security and deep learning. The Oasis team includes leading experts in privacy, security, distributed systems, blockchain, AI and machine learning.

Oasis's leadership has led a number of open source projects in the areas of secure and privacy-preserving computing, including the open source differential privacy project with Uber and the open source keystone project (in collaboration with research groups at MIT and UC Berkeley) to develop open-source secure hardware. These projects have contributed to the foundation of Oasis Labs' technologies and approach.