2024 is poised to be a historic year of accelerated growth and development for the Oasis Network ecosystem. After capping off a fast-paced year of setting the foundations, fostering the community and launching key products, the entire Oasis community is excited to continue the momentum of 2023 throughout 2024. 

Here’s what you can expect from Oasis Foundation’s engineering team in 2024:
 

• Deeper integrations with the Ethereum ecosystem
• Improved Oasis developer experience
• Enhanced Oasis user experience
• Bolster network security and resilience
• Improved runtime and storage performance

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Ethereum Ecosystem Integration Plans

The Oasis team is excited to build a closer integration with the Ethereum ecosystem as a core pillar of its 2024 roadmap. Over the past year, Oasis has worked to align itself closer with the Ethereum ecosystem with projects such as improvements to the Oasis SDK, adding Ethereum-compatible ZKP primitives and launching the Oasis Privacy Layer (OPL) to bring Sapphire’s industry-leading confidentiality to Ethereum and any other EVM network. 

The next steps in this process include adding support for securely and quickly verifying arbitrary Ethereum state. To do this, Oasis will be implementing Ethereum light client committees additionally secured by existing Oasis mechanisms for secure attestation as a defense in depth strategy. This will enable fast proof verification by Oasis Sapphire smart contracts of arbitrary data stored on Ethereum without relying on external oracles. By the end of Q1 2024, Oasis nodes will be able to run attested Ethereum light clients and commit current verified block headers on-chain.

Oasis engineers are also planning to integrate a laundry list of better Ethereum tooling. In Q1 and Q2, for starters, the roadmap includes Foundry support, improving the Oasis TypeScript client and more. Later in the year, Oasis plans to develop a Metamask Snap, add Ethers-rs support and a Remix plugin for encrypted transactions on Sapphire.

To further improve Ethereum compatibility with Oasis Sapphire, engineers will focus on msg.sender semantics, support for multiple outstanding transactions in the transaction pool, trace support for local debugging and more.

In the second half of the year, Oasis engineers plan to explore validation of Oasis consensus layer state transitions on Ethereum via execution proofs. This validation will strengthen Oasis security and, as a side effect, Oasis will also be able to trustlessly and more easily pass messages to Ethereum. Stay tuned for more Ethereum tooling and compatibility announcements throughout the year.

Oasis Developer Experience Improvements

Builders and creators are the lifeblood of every healthy Web3 ecosystem. This simple fact is why Oasis engineers are committed to improving the overall experience running applications on Oasis, extending these changes to support successful partnerships within the Oasis community and other networks of Web3. In particular, these improvements will focus on faster and less resource-intensive development when using the Sapphire runtime or its accompanying Oasis Privacy Layer (OPL) wrapper.

One key area for the ecosystem is creating new example dApps and nurturing standards which demonstrate cutting-edge features and untapped opportunities available to developers building with Confidential EVM, this includes documentation and user guides for a variety of Oasis use cases, including account abstraction, confidential voting, cross-chain intents, key management as a service and more. 

Oasis engineers are committed to ensuring excellent developer experiences when using demo dApps. Oasis just launched a substantially improved Oasis Playground home page where developers are able to see at a glance and browse through all Oasis and community-provided demo dApps. Later in the year, Oasis will add automation and CI to all the Oasis provided demo dApps to ensure they are always up-to-date and offer a seamless experience to developers and builders that will fork them to start their own projects on the Oasis Network.

Oasis User Experience Enhancements

Users are an essential component of all Web3 ecosystems. The Oasis Engineering team will continue focusing on improving user experience across all user-facing products throughout the year.

• Oasis will launch a more secure and streamlined Oasis Wallet Browser Extension based on a modular new wallet architecture.
• To meet a frequent request from the community, Oasis will be launching iOS and Android Oasis Wallet mobile apps that will make staking, sending, and receiving ROSE on-the-go more convenient and secure.
• Later in the year, Oasis plans to refresh the Oasis Wallet UI and UX across all editions (i.e., web, browser extension and mobile) to make the wallets more ergonomic and frictionless to use.
• To make the existing Ethereum community feel at home with Oasis Sapphire and OPL, Oasis will explore providing a Metamask snap that will enable a seamless experience when using encrypted transactions and other privacy features of Sapphire and OPL.
• Following the launch of Oasis Explorer and Oasis Nexus in 2023, Oasis engineering will be making it the default block explorer for Sapphire and Emerald in Q1 2024.
• Later in the year, Oasis will extend both Oasis Explorer and Oasis Nexus with full consensus layer support. This will provide a holistic and coherent experience for users exploring everything related to the Oasis Network in a single product.
• The ROSE (un)wrapper dApp launched in late 2023 received great success. Following suit, Oasis will launch the ROSE staking dApp to provide easy staking from Sapphire in Q2.
• Tech savvy and power users in the Oasis community will also enjoy continuous improvement to the Oasis CLI.

Bolster Network Security and Resilience 

In tandem with other protocol and ecosystem product improvements, the Oasis engineering team will work to improve lower-level aspects of the network. Exploring support for other TEE technologies is a focus for later in the calendar year, which includes Intel TDX, NVIDIA TEE and Amazon Nitro Enclaves. These additional TEE developments would be useful for Oasis runtimes that need to perform more complex logic, whether on or off chain. 

Additional TEEs are also a key component of Oasis engineering’s defense-in-depth strategy to create multiple layers of protocol defenses such that several backup mechanisms exist to thwart potential threats before they disrupt the network. Defense in depth is an approach to network security that uses multiple layers of defensive mechanisms to protect users and their data. In a scenario where one security mechanism fails, another mechanism is ready to continue thwarting an attack. Oasis uses the intentional redundancies of this multi-layered approach to exponentially increase the security of the network as a whole across many different attack vectors.

Oasis key management will also see improvements this year. Using an MPC protocol exposed via the Oasis key manager API, a threshold secret sharing key manager protocol will enable further protections against node compromise for key management runtime enclaves. Key management enclaves will hold shares of a master secret which uses an elliptic curve version of the CHURP protocol and Key Distribution Center protocol.

Runtime and Storage Performance Improvements 

Runtime improvements continue to be a priority for Oasis Engineering in 2024. In particular, performance improvements that optimize the Merkle trie storage database and the runtime storage protocol are engineering priorities this year.

The storage database is a key component that is responsible for holding and authenticating all state held by both the runtimes and the consensus layer. Improving its performance will help enhance both block execution and data queries.

Oasis Engineering also plans to evaluate different storage layouts and database backends to determine what works best for the workloads at hand and how to reduce I/O amplification.

The Road Ahead

The best is yet to come for Oasis, and a lot of it will set sail in 2024. The entire Oasis Foundation team will continue to build and improve industry-leading production-ready confidentiality and adjacent tools to support the global community of Web3 builders. 

The future of crypto depends on robust privacy for any developer, any dApp and any blockchain. Stay connected with the Oasis community of developers, users, and ambassadors by joining us on Discord, Reddit and Forum or following Oasis on Twitter.