Oasis Protocol recently announced the launch of a strategic investment arm, marking a shift from pure ecosystem grants to longer-term capital deployment and hands-on technical collaboration.
The first investment from this new arm is SemiLiquid, a project building custody-native credit infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets.
From a developer and infrastructure perspective, this is an interesting signal about where Oasis is positioning itself.
What SemiLiquid is building
SemiLiquid focuses on enabling credit against tokenized assets without requiring those assets to leave institutional custody.
In practice, this means
• Assets remain with a qualified custodian
• Credit eligibility and collateral constraints are verified on-chain
• Sensitive financial data is never publicly exposed
This addresses a major blocker for institutional DeFi adoption: privacy and compliance around balance sheets, collateral composition, and counterparty exposure.
Why Oasis is involved
SemiLiquid is built on Oasis’s confidential compute stack, including Sapphire and Oasis’s runtime confidentiality guarantees.
The key technical components include
• Confidential smart contracts executed in trusted execution environments
• On-chain verification with private state
• Liquefaction primitives that allow off-chain or private data to influence on-chain logic without disclosure
For developers, this shows a concrete production use case where confidential EVM execution is not just a theoretical privacy feature, but a requirement for regulated financial workflows.
Pilot results and real usage
According to Oasis, SemiLiquid has already completed pilot workflows with institutional partners such as Franklin Templeton and Zodia Custody.
These pilots included
• Collateral locking
• Credit issuance
• Automated repayment logic
• Privacy-preserving verification
All executed on Oasis infrastructure.
This is notable because many RWA projects stall at the proof-of-concept stage, while this one appears to be testing full lifecycle flows.
Why this matters for builders
If you are building in DeFi, RWAs, or compliance-aware systems, this announcement highlights a few trends
• Confidential execution is becoming infrastructure, not a niche feature
• Institutions require verifiable logic without public state exposure
• Blockchain investment arms are starting to fund infrastructure layers, not just applications
Oasis moving from grants to strategic investments suggests a focus on fewer but more deeply integrated projects that push the limits of what on-chain systems can safely handle.
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