Dawn Song, PhD, is CEO and founder of Oasis Labs and is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. She is a world-renowned expert on cryptography and privacy-preserving data analytics and AI. In 2018 she founded Oasis Labs, a decentralized cloud solution with built-in data privacy and top-notch security.

“There’s a really urgent need for this new paradigm, this new paradigm of responsible data economy that enables data to be utilized actually more easily but in a more responsible way. In order to do this, it needs a combination of technical and non-technical solutions.”

– Dawn Song 

Dawn has spent significant time researching and building security and privacy technologies, specifically in the areas of software, networking, distributed systems, applied cryptography, blockchains, smart contracts, and machine learning.

In this interview, we discuss her activity at UC Berkeley and quickly jump to the problem (privacy, data ownership) that inspired her to found Oasis Labs, and the various components (confidential computing, differential privacy, blockchain) that allow Oasis Labs to provide a decentralized cloud solution that creates a new privacy paradigm. In the last part, we go deeper into the crypto / blockchain rabbit hole and discuss DeFi (Decentralized Finance), DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), Uniswap, and the future of Oasis Labs and crypto.