Researchers from UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, University of Washington, Cornell, and Google have come together to launch Oasis Labs and build a high-performance cloud computing platform on blockchain.

Oasis Labs will be led by Dawn Song, a MacArthur fellow and professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. Together, the researchers will work to bring smart contracts at scale and blockchain to the real world.

According to the team, the platform will enable innovations and applications that could not previously be built.

The Oasis’ platform will be designed to give users more control over their data with privacy-preserving smart contracts that provide privacy protection without having to rely on a central party, the team explained. The architecture also aims to provide scalability and integrity without having to rely on other hardware or a central party.

The team says the platform’s technology was inspired by their research experience and industry collaboration, such as recent work on an open source differential privacy project in collaboration with Uber, an open source keystone project to develop open source hardware in collaboration with MIT and UC Berkeley, and a research paper on Ekidan, which is a platform for smart contract execution.

“As a team with deep roots in academia and extensive experience in entrepreneurship and bringing cutting-edge research technology to practice, we are thrilled to embark on a journey together with our community to bring to the world a new computing paradigm,” the Oasis Team wrote in a post.