A16z Leads $45 Million Raise for Blockchain Startup Oasis Labs

Cloud computing startup Oasis Labs successfully raised $45 million in a private token pre-sale to develop a blockchain platform aimed to rival Amazon Web Services

The sale, led by Andreessen Horowitz’s new “a16z” crypto fund, saw Accel, Binance, Pantera, Polychain, Metastable, Foundation Capital, Electric Capital, DCVC and Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam all contribute, according to a press release. Most notably, this was a16z’s first investment, Oasis CEO Dawn Song told CoinDesk.

The startup is now focusing on developing its core features, Song said, which will be deployed to the company’s private test network – slated to be opened to the public “soon.”

It’s the startup’s blockchain itself that may be garnering all the investor attention. According to Song, its architecture allows transactions to be verified with “far less duplication while providing the same level of integrity and security guarantees.”

She added:

“In our experiments we see performance orders of magnitude greater than Ethereum. This architecture also supports far more computationally intensive tasks like machine learning and AI, which are not possible with today’s blockchain technologies.”

“Security and privacy [are] built into every layer of the network,” she continued. As a result, the blockchain is built “top-to-bottom” with those two features in mind, ensuring that transactions can be verified without nodes seeing sensitive data and smart contracts will not leak private information.

The applications built upon the network will also differ from those currently being developed for existing platforms, Song explained. “For example, our machine learning framework enables smart contract developers to perform training and inference directly in the smart contract, while preserving privacy of data.”

“Our platform is also backwards compatible with Ethereum, making the transition easy for any developer that is already comfortable with existing tools,” she said.

U.S. dollars image via Shutterstock

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