Milestones
What we have done so far
Shared-memory operating system.
Digital currency and utilities.
Sports oracle and betting market.
1. Oscar the Operating System.
Oscar allows an application to run on many machines as if they were one super-machine, or in other words: Oscar allows an application to run on a fleet.
fleet, noun: A network of machines hosting Oscar.
Applications running on Oscar are faster, more resilient, simpler to maintain, and more transparent than legacy applications.
Oscar was designed to run fast with a light footprint.
Oscar can be configured with Byzantine Fault Tolerance, an auditable transaction history, and a sound native currency: os.
Our canary fleet (currently offline) has been hosting Oscar along with the apps described below.
canary, noun: An experimental fleet running as it would in production but without stability guarantees.
2. Ramp: on-ramp and currency-exchange.
Ramp offers two services:
An on-ramp enables purchasing New Zealand Dollar tokens (nz).
A currency exchange enables swapping between nz and os at market rates.
nz is similar to os but is in one-to-one correspondence with NZ dollars we hold so that if we offer an off-ramp in the future it will be redeemable.
Below is the entire code used to deploy Ramp’s currency exchange on Oscar
It is not so readable at the moment but we can make a couple of observations:
The app is simple. The entire business logic is displayed above. The rest of the project is a basic html web interface.
The app is stateless. The app exposes a single function: trade, which calculates some quantities based on balances stored by Oscar, and either executes a pair of transfers or aborts. The app is a stateless interface to the data store, which is to say, to Oscar.
There are no user accounts. Authentication is replaced by public-key cryptography, which is simpler and less annoying for users. Signature verification is handled by Oscar. No user data is collected. The only sensitive data associated with the app is the private key used to sign the transaction that deploys it.
3. Bet: oracle and betting market.
Bet is a bookmaker sports oracle that offers competitive odds on sporting events and takes the other side of wagers. Like Ramp it is simple, stateless, and has no user accounts. Bet in fact uses Ramp as an embedded wallet, demonstrating the composability of apps built in this way.
If either of the websites linked above went offline users could still access the apps by interacting directly with Oscar from the command line or from any desktop client we build in the future.
The only way an app running on Oscar can be unreachable is if Oscar’s fleet goes down, and the probability of that happening can be brought as close to zero as we like. We will expand on this in future posts.