Skip to main content

Introduction

Oyster is a sub-network of Marlin that specializes in offering TEE-based coprocessors. It is fast, cheap and secure. Users can rent instances individually for any duration they require. It also facilitates the delegation of tasks among a pool of nodes in a serverless manner, ensuring that users only pay for the actual execution time of their tasks. Moreover, these serverless executions can be subscribed, enabling users to schedule them to occur periodically at regular intervals. As the these cases have different user workflows and provide different protocol guarantees, they are discussed separately and herein referred to as the Isolated Instance and Serverless protocol. The Serverless protocol builds on the Isolated Instance protocol. Users can rent Nodes and delegate tasks using both smart contract calls and web 2 APIs.

Features:

  1. Secure: Oyster nodes use TEEs to guarantee security. As explained in the section on TEEs, hardware isolation ensures that programs run correctly as intended without exposing their contents and prohibiting interference from the host machine or its owner. Oyster relies on TEEs to also ensure that nodes meet their uptime and optionally, response time guarantees.

  2. Fast: Oyster nodes are essentially like usual servers. There’s no redundancy in computation or complex protocol logic or cryptography as in Multi-Party Computations (MPCs), Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) or Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). Thus, apart from a little SGX overhead for encrypted memory access, Oyster nodes are very performant and provide an experience similar to running programs on a normal machine.

  3. Cheap: TEEs can be considered commoditized. While a little more expensive than vanilla servers, they are very cheap compared to blockchains, MPC, FHE or ZK proofs. Consequently, TEEs are a very affordable mode to carry out computations verifiably.

Node operators can list TEEs with different hardware configurations on the Oyster marketplace. If you have a machine that supports SGX or a AWS, GCP or Azure account and would like to participate as a node operator in the Oyster marketplace, check the link below.

Users/developers can then rent instances that meet their requirements in a geography of their choice through the marketplace. The instances are dedicated to the user till they keep topping up their wallet and ensuring that the instance provider keeps getting paid. To browse through the list of instances, rent machines individually and learn more about the security guarantees that come with Oyster, check the link below.

A subset of nodes available in the network may opt to participate in the serverless pool. This pool consists of two types of nodes: Gateways and Executors. These nodes remain active at all times and are compensated by the protocol. To learn more about how to join the serverless pool, refer to the following links below.

Oyster Serverless enables users to execute functions without the hassle of renting a machine. Users are charged only for the actual execution time of their tasks, and they can also use subscription service to execute functions periodically. To learn more about Oyster Serverless and start using it, please check the link below.