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What is Oyster?

Oyster is a sub-network of Marlin that specializes in offering TEE-based coprocessors. It is fast, cheap and secure. It allows instances to be rented individually for any stretch of time or for tasks to be delegated amongst a pool of nodes in a serverless way without individually renting instances and paying only for the duration of the task’s execution. Nodes can be rented and tasks delegated 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 links 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 links below.

A subset of the nodes available in the market are chosen by the protocol regularly to form part of the serverless pool. These nodes are always-on and are paid by the protocol. Users can use Oyster Serverless for execution of tasks or functions without having to go through the process of renting a machine themselves. Additionally, users only pay the time it takes to get the task executed. In order to learn more about Oyster Serverless and use it, check the links below.