Dawn Song is the CEO and co-founder of Oasis Labs and a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Known for long-running work in computer security and privacy, she has become a prominent advocate for privacy-preserving computation in blockchain systems, particularly through efforts associated with the Oasis ecosystem.
Overview
Blockchains make execution and data transparent by default, which supports auditability but can limit real-world use cases that require confidentiality. Song’s work in crypto emphasizes selective disclosure, meaning applications can keep certain inputs, outputs, or state private while still producing verifiable results. This approach targets scenarios where transparency can create information leakage, such as trading strategies, sensitive identity attributes, and regulated datasets.
History and Background
Song’s academic research spans applied cryptography, software and network security, distributed systems, and security for machine learning. Her industry profile is shaped by translating security concepts into deployable systems, a theme that has grown in relevance as privacy regulation and data governance pressures have increased across technology and financial services.
Oasis Labs emerged publicly in 2018 with a stated focus on privacy-first computing infrastructure. The company announced a $45 million funding round led by a16z crypto, with participation that included Accel and Binance Labs. The funding supported expansion of engineering and research aimed at practical privacy-preserving computation.
Core Products and Services
Oasis Labs is commonly discussed alongside Oasis Network (ROSE), a layer 1 ecosystem oriented around confidential compute. While Oasis Labs is a company and the network is supported by ecosystem organizations such as the Oasis Foundation, Song has been one of the most visible public representatives communicating the motivations and trade-offs behind confidentiality in decentralized systems.
In interviews and public commentary, Song has framed privacy as an adoption requirement rather than a niche feature. A CryptoSlate interview with Song discusses privacy, smart contract risk, and longer-term questions about cryptography and protocol resilience: Why Oasis Labs’ Dawn Song is big on privacy, quantum-resistant blockchains, and DeFi 2.0.
Technology and Features
Privacy-preserving computation in Web3 typically aims to limit data exposure while maintaining verifiable execution. Across the industry, approaches can include trusted execution environments, secure enclaves, and cryptographic methods designed to reduce what is revealed to the public chain, counterparties, or infrastructure operators. Song’s work is frequently associated with building blocks that make these techniques usable for developers and interpretable for auditors and risk teams.
Focus areas commonly tied to Song’s work include:
- Confidential smart contracts, enabling selective disclosure of contract state, inputs, or outputs.
- Privacy-preserving data sharing, supporting analytics or collaboration without exposing raw datasets.
- Security-first engineering, emphasizing threat models, auditing, and operational controls for systems that handle sensitive data.
Use Cases and Market Position
Oasis-related development has often been positioned around privacy-centric DeFi and data-intensive applications. CryptoSlate has covered efforts to connect privacy-oriented DeFi applications with external data feeds, such as oracle support for privacy-centric DeFi apps. Privacy has also been discussed as a tool for mitigating information leakage in automated strategies, including arguments for private execution in agent-driven finance: Why DeFi agents need a private brain.
Funding and Team
As CEO, Song is typically presented as leading Oasis Labs’ strategic direction and product focus, with an emphasis on aligning research-driven security ideas with production requirements. The 2018 $45 million round led by a16z crypto, with participation including Accel and Binance Labs, is a notable milestone that signaled investor interest in privacy-preserving infrastructure as a distinct layer of the Web3 stack.
Risks and Considerations
Privacy systems introduce trade-offs. Confidential execution can complicate developer tooling, auditing, and incident response, and some techniques add additional security assumptions that must be monitored over time. Privacy features can also attract heightened compliance scrutiny, especially when policymakers associate privacy tooling with sanctions evasion or illicit finance. The policy environment has been shaped by high-profile debates such as OFAC’s Tornado Cash sanctions and their downstream effects on infrastructure and interfaces: Ethereum is under attack as U.S. sanctions apply at a protocol level.
Song’s work highlights a broader design challenge for crypto: enabling confidentiality where it is necessary while preserving enough transparency for accountability, security review, and market integrity.
