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The all-in-one privacy-enabled ParaTime for the Oasis Network is here. Start building with it today.

We announced the Cipher ParaTime Launch onto an incentivized Testnet back in June. Since then, we’ve had 40 avid validators set up nodes and over 200 interested members join our #cipher-paratime community channel in Slack.

We are beyond excited to say IT’S READY! 🎉

Today is the day that Cipher officially launches onto the Oasis Mainnet.

Core Features:

• Fully decentralized with node operators distributed across the world
• Oasis ROSE tokens will be the native token used in the ParaTime for gas fees
• Support for WebAssembly smart contracts
• Support for confidential compute

ParaTime Incentives

• The ParaTime will release tokens on-chain to reward nodes for participation.
• The reward program is 2 years long, and tokens will be released per epoch.
• The reward will be 10 ROSE tokens per entity per epoch. Epochs are currently produced at a one per hour speed and each node has approximately 1/3 of chance of being selected in the primary committee to claim the rewards, hence a node entity can earn ~80 ROSE tokens per day and ~2400 ROSE tokens per month.

Why is Cipher important?

We believe Cipher is one of the vital building blocks that will unlock the true potential of DeFi and bring it beyond early adopters and traders to the mass market.

Cipher will achieve this in 2 ways:

• Scalability — Improving the usability of DeFi.
• Privacy — Bringing confidentiality to private transactions.

Why will Cipher help DeFi to scale?

DeFi is and will continue to be a transformative technology. However, in its current form, it’s burdened with astronomically high fees and low throughput for even simple tasks and computation.

These challenges have led to the rise of so-called “ETH-Killers” like Polkadot, Avalanche, and Solana, who all promise to be faster and cheaper. This problem has even spawned L2 scaling solutions like rollups and sharding. Everyone knows this problem needs to be solved.

The Oasis Network’s unique architecture separates consensus and computation and enables up to 1000 Transactions Per Second (TPS), instant finality, and fees 99% cheaper than Ethereum.

Cipher’s Smart Contract module will enable all lending, exchange, stablecoins, oracles, and payments Dapps to utilize this speed, high throughput, and low cost, unlocking DeFi’s potential to capture more market share away from the traditional finance sector.

But Privacy Is The Key 🗝

Traditional Finance is a black box. To unlock more market share DeFi needs to acknowledge that there ARE transactions that need to be kept private.

The absence of centralized private keys in DeFi opens it up to significant security risks and other problems, including:

• Front-running or more broadly, Miner Extractable Value (MEV)
• Over-collateralization
• Wallet balances being public
• Transactions’ direction (i.e. who is sending, who receiving) and other fields (amount, fee) being public
• Large transactions crawled by bots that in some cases move markets

Cipher’s introduction of private Smart Contracts and confidential computations to the blockchain will enable:

• Private and under-collateralized lending
• Private DEXes with no MEV
• Private stablecoins that protect the identity, balance, and transactions of their users
• Private payments that protect the sender, receiver, and the transaction amount

All this is just improvements to the existing DeFi system. Privacy is critical for DeFi to capture more of the traditional finance market.

For example, with under-collateralized loans, individuals could upload sensitive financial data — allowing them to establish their creditworthiness and providing assurances to a lender that they will pay their debts. This will allow lenders to offer under-collateralized loans for the first time on blockchain, unlocking entirely new markets and expanding DeFi to a mainstream audience.

Roadmap

Today, Cipher is live on the Oasis Network Mainnet!

Moreover, the upcoming new smart contract features of Cipher are live and being tested on the Oasis Network Testnet.

To get a preview of the upcoming WASM smart contract module support, join our #cipher-paratime community channel in Slack and start building today!

Build a private lending protocol, a DEX, start a stablecoin or a payments protocol that protects its users. Cipher has endless possibilities, and we look forward to seeing what the talented blockchain community can do with it.

We are still supporting entrepreneurs and teams that want to build on the Oasis Network with our ROSE BLOOM Grants program. Click here to apply for your grant.

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