Anchorage to custody Oasis Network’s ROSE coin

The California-based crypto company Anchorage has been chosen as the official custody partner for the Oasis Network’s utility token, ROSE.

Anchorage, which counts Visa among its investors, is set to give ROSE token-holders the option of holding their assets in an environment that is both more secure and usable than what cold storage provides.

When the Oasis Network’s mainnet launches, this cryptocurrency will enable the blockchain’s participants to initiate and approve transactions securely, vote on governance questions, and benefit from its Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism.

“We have been working with the Oasis Labs team building custody support, testing functionality against their testnets, and helping support their dry run mainnet exercises,” Diogo Mónica, the co-founder and president of Anchorage, told Modern Consensus via email. “We are excited to support the Oasis privacy-first protocol that will enable a paradigm shift for DeFi use cases and apps where people own and manage their data.”

The team behind the Oasis Network has said its goal is returning the internet to what it used to be: a decentralized environment that focused on openness, inclusivity, and empowering individuals to retain ownership of their data and extract value from it.

The privacy-focused network is split into two parts, the Consensus Layer and the ParaTime Layer. A news release supplied to Modern Consensus explained: “This unique design allows Oasis Network to parallelize operations and scale each layer independently.”

One of the main stated goals of ROSE is to give users financial sovereignty and control over their data, with the utility token set to play “a critical role in how ecosystem partners interact with each other and how data is permissioned for usage or storage on the Oasis Network,” it said.

A name steeped in history

It seems like a lot of thought has gone into the cryptocurrency’s name. Jernej Kos, the director of the Oasis Foundation, told Modern Consensus via email: “Roses are symbols of privacy dating all the way back to Ancient Greece. At the time, the rose was seen as a symbol for secrets or privacy, used by Aphrodite as a gift in exchange for keeping the secrets of gods.

“In Ancient Rome, this symbolism continued and the phrase ’sub rosa’ or ‘under the rose’ was to mean ‘done in secret’ or ‘under a pledge of secrecy.’ This phrase and the symbol of roses as secrecy extended throughout history with the British Tudors era where state secrets were decided in a room with a large rose hanging from the ceiling.”

Kos explained that the rich backstory of roses fits well with the vision for the Oasis Network, which aims to “power the next generation of blockchain use cases through its unique capacity to support confidential computing and private data on the ledger.”

Over time, the Oasis Foundation executive hopes that ROSE will help deliver the next generation of privacy-preserving applications—unlocking new use cases in open finance and powering a responsible, user-owned data economy. As the network continues to evolve, plans are in place to introduce data yield farming at a later date.

Although Anchorage will support ROSE as soon as the Oasis Network mainnet launches, Kos was unable to provide an exact date for when it will go live. “The project is currently running a release candidate for mainnet and hopes to launch soon,” he added.

Past, present and future

Anchorage and the Oasis Foundation have separately hit the headlines in recent months.

As reported by Modern Consensus in July, Anchorage has partnered with Silvergate Bank to ensure that its users can access Bitcoin and crypto-backed loans without having to take their funds out of custody.

This will have been music to the ears of those who want to explore what the DeFi industry has to offer, yet are worried about posting collateral outside of the security of custody. CipherTrace research has estimated that $1.4 billion was lost to crypto thefts, hacks, and fraud over the first five months of 2020 alone—a figure that’s almost certainly risen substantially—so it’s no wonder consumers are concerned.

And last month, the Oasis Network announced it had launched a university program with more than 20 founding members—including Blockchain at Berkeley, where the project was founded. Each university will be an active member of the ecosystem, building apps and helping to govern the network.