Author: Oasis Chinese

The launch of the first EVM-compatible privacy ParaTime, Sapphire, will highlight the significant progress made by the Oasis network in 2022.

In the recently concluded first and second quarters of 2022, Oasis successfully achieved its development goals, and in the third and fourth quarters of 2022, we are pleased to share with the community our upcoming major initiatives to ensure a successful conclusion to this year's work.

In the next phase of development, the top priority for the Oasis network is to smoothly launch the first-ever EVM-compatible privacy ParaTime, Sapphire.

Sapphire is a groundbreaking developer environment as it is the first and only privacy EVM computing environment, which is of great importance as it elegantly enables a large portion of blockchain developers to leverage privacy-first features to build the foundation of Web3.

Being EVM-compatible, Sapphire provides Solidity developers with a familiar and 99% Ethereum-compatible development environment, allowing developers to easily utilize the unique privacy protection technologies offered by the Oasis network to create rich dApps, thereby unveiling broader application scenarios and helping blockchain become a key part of the Web3 world.

【Sapphire is now live on the testnet: The first EVM-compatible privacy ParaTime】

Additionally, we will enhance our existing privacy ParaTime, Cipher, through a mainnet upgrade to enable WebAssembly-based privacy smart contract functionality. We will also release support for SGXv2 and DCAP-based proofs to improve TEE performance and support the latest generation of CPUs.

Moreover, other important focuses for the next two quarters include communication between ParaTimes and stabilizing the Oasis SDK. We welcome you to read on for more exciting content.

Mainnet Launch of Sapphire

We plan to launch the first EVM-compatible privacy ParaTime, Sapphire, on the mainnet in the coming months, with key highlights including:

• By default, contract states are privacy-protected.
• Contract call data can be privacy-protected, allowing miners to extract zero value since you cannot pre-run what you cannot see.
• Stronger security and integrity guarantees, as a compromise secure enclaves solution is required in addition to the computation committee.
• Compatibility with existing Ethereum developer tools: the developer experience is nearly indistinguishable from Ethereum, and the user experience remains unchanged.
• Additional built-in features for smart contracts, such as RNG (randomness), signing, and encryption technologies.
• A new block resource explorer brings a better user experience for Emerald and Sapphire, specifically tailored to support Sapphire's privacy features.

Cipher Mainnet Upgrade

In the future, the Oasis network also plans to conduct a mainnet upgrade for Cipher ParaTime to enable WebAssembly-based privacy smart contracts, with key highlights including:

• Privacy and public contract states
• Support for more complex Rust-based libraries
• (Some content is similar to what was described above for Sapphire, but it is not EVM)

Support for SGXv2 and DCAP-based Verification

To achieve TEE performance improvements and support the latest generation of CPUs, we will introduce support for SGXv2 and DCAP-based verification in the upcoming release of Oasis Core. Once this work is fully tested on the testnet and deployed to the mainnet, final activation will be completed through governance proposals on the Oasis consensus layer. Key highlights include:

• Both old (EPID) and new (ECDSA) remote attestation schemes will be supported in an interoperable manner, allowing for upgrades over time.
• Reduced reliance on Intel Attestation Service (IAS), thereby improving availability. With DCAP-based proofs, successful remote attestation artifacts can be cached.
• Acceptable remote attestation policies can now be defined through network and runtime governance.

Inter-ParaTime Communication

In the future, Oasis will enable verified asset and data transfers between ParaTimes, secured by the Oasis consensus layer. This will allow seamless calls between smart contracts residing on different ParaTimes, enabling communication between Emerald, Sapphire, and Cipher smart contracts.

Stabilizing the Oasis SDK

In the future, we also plan to stabilize the Oasis SDK, which includes the ParaTime SDK for easily building new ParaTimes, the Contract SDK for WebAssembly smart contracts, and various client SDKs (currently including Typescript and Go) for interacting with the Oasis network and its ParaTimes. We will also improve the overall developer documentation.

Striding into Web3

For the Oasis network, this year is significant, and we are just over halfway through it. The progress we have made in launching and improving ParaTimes is tremendous.

Our first EVM ParaTime, Emerald, has opened the door for Solidity developers, and the launch of Cipher is a huge milestone that showcases the immense growth potential of Oasis's privacy protection technology in the blockchain environment.

Now, the launch of Sapphire is the next step towards Web3, as we leverage privacy capabilities like Cipher ParaTime to enable a broad range of developers to easily access and utilize this functionality, facilitating a smoother transition into Web3. We welcome everyone to join the Oasis ecosystem and build Web3 together!

About Oasis

​The Oasis network officially launched on November 19, 2020, and is the world's first decentralized blockchain network with privacy features and scalability. In terms of technological innovation, the unique layered architecture of the Oasis network separates smart contracts into a consensus layer and a ParaTime layer, ensuring absolute security of user privacy information while achieving higher performance and stronger customizability, further unlocking new use cases and applications for blockchain.

At the same time, the Oasis network has innovatively proposed the concept of "data tokenization," allowing users to fully control their private data and earn rewards by sharing it, further achieving privacy protection and promoting the construction of a responsible data economy.

Oasis is also supported by a number of well-known industry investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain, Pantera, Dragonfly, and Binance Labs. With high performance + security + privacy protection, Oasis will redefine centralized finance and fundamentally change the way open finance operates.

Since its launch, the Oasis network has conducted hackathons, global ambassador recruitment, the ROSE token blossom program, and other activities, attracting countless industry-leading application developers/blockchain infrastructure teams and node operators to join us, leading to unprecedented prosperity in the Oasis network ecosystem.