ROSE is the native token of Oasis Network, a proof-of-stake blockchain that claims to be highly scalable while supporting confidential smart contracts.

ROSE launched at nearly 4 cents in November 2020. It climbed unsteadily during 2021, hitting 22 cents in March before sinking to 5 cents in June. Prices improved at the start of 2022; ROSE hit its all-time high of 59 cents in the middle of January. The token crashed along with the rest of the market in May, and had sunk to 6 cents by June.

ROSE’s total supply is capped at 10 billion. About 1.5 billion were released during the mainnet launch. Of these, 23.5% were reserved for staking rewards and 18.5% for the community. The Foundation – the network’s steward – was endowed with 10%, and partners, core contributors and early backers received the rest.

ROSE powers the Oasis Network. This is a layer 1 blockchain composed of two layers. The first is the Consensus Layer, which validates transactions with a proof-of-stake protocol and handles governance voting and committee elections (more governance). The second is the ParaTime Layer, which runs multiple computing environments simultaneously.

These layers are separated, meaning Oasis can process several transactions at the same time and won’t be stymied by huge orders of computing work. Other blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, work through queues of transactions chronologically, causing bottlenecks during periods of heightened activity. All this helps Oasis to achieve up to 1,000 transactions per second.

Oasis also allows for private smart contracts. Nodes executing them have to use a Trusted Execution Environment – a secure part of the network. TEEs are very common elsewhere: Apple uses them in the iPhone to keep user data secure.

With Oasis’s private smart contracts, encrypted data goes into ParaTime’s secure enclave. Then it’s decrypted, processed by ParaTime’s compute nodes and encrypted once again and uploaded to the blockchain. This means that its smart contracts can handle confidential data.

By contrast, all information contained within an Ethereum transaction is public. While companies who handle sensitive data balk at public blockchains, the implication is they could find a solution in Oasis. Companies building applications on Oasis include Binance, Chainlink and BMW.

ROSE is used for settling payments and paying for smart contract operations, as well as staking and delegating for the Oasis Consensus Layer.

Oasis was created by Oasis Labs, a software company founded in 2018 by a University of California, Berkeley computer science professor, Dawn Song. The project’s long-term steward is the Oasis Protocol Foundation.

The Foundation proposed that the network is governed through representative democracy, whereby the Foundation guides the development of the platform and coordinates the community. Node operators vote on community suggestions using ROSE tokens.

“We propose this model because we think it will provide a balanced voice to all engaged community members – from developers of all sizes, to node owners, to token holders – while at the same time still facilitating the swift deployment of network updates, new features, critical bug fixes,” writes the Foundation in Oasis’s documentation.

According to data on Crunchbase, Oasis received $45 million in a Series A funding round led by a16z crypto, the crypto arm of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.