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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Top comments (4)
This is a strong signal from Oasis Protocol, especially for builders.
Backing SemiLiquid shows confidential execution isn’t a “privacy feature” anymore, it’s core infrastructure for RWAs. Credit, collateral, and risk logic simply can’t be public, and Sapphire + liquefaction seem purpose-built for that.
The move from grants to strategic investments also matters, fewer projects, but deeper integration and real production use cases. If this continues, Oasis looks increasingly well-positioned for serious RWA and compliance-heavy DeFi.
confidential RWA credit infrastructure - this is such an intriguing development. I think while the narrative around RWA has been going steady for some time, not much work has been done to look into the privacy aspect. Glad to see Oasis and SemiLiquid doing this together. Also, excited to see some real-world applications of liquefaction.
Exciting news Oasis is evolving from grants into strategic capital deployment with its new investment arm, kicking off with a bet on SemiLiquid’s confidential RWA credit infrastructure. By backing custody-native credit built on Oasis’s confidential compute stack (Sapphire/Liquefaction), this moves privacy-first, institutional-grade tokenized finance from theory toward real pilot adoption addressing key compliance and confidentiality hurdles for RWAs
This feels like a very intentional move from Oasis. Backing SemiLiquid highlights where confidential compute actually becomes essential, not optional, custody-native credit simply doesn’t work with fully transparent contracts. For builders in RWAs or institutional DeFi, this is a clear signal that privacy-preserving execution is moving from “nice to have” into core infrastructure.