Monero and Zcash are “privacy coins,” concerned with facilitating anonymous and untraceable transactions. Instead, Oasis is focused on data privacy, supporting applications that need to process sensitive data. Privacy coins serve an important, but narrow purpose. Confidential paratimes can support a wide range of use cases beyond anonymous transactions.

There are some big differences compared to each of those, both in the overall architecture of the network and the security design. To start, let's first explore the overall architecture to highlight how confidentiality is being protected in the Oasis network architecture. On a high level, the Oasis network introduces a notion of ParaTimes which are their own blockchains sharing security with the consensus layer. The consensus layer itself is not confidential and does not support user-uploadable smart contracts. Its core function is to manage everything that is needed to support ParaTimes. In stark contrast, Monero and Zcash are privacy coins at the consensus layer and do not aim to support general confidential smart contracts.