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We are excited to announce that our proposed upgrade has secured a successful governance vote from node operators, with over 88% positive votes from validators. Following extensive testing, both internally and on the Testnet, and barring any last-minute critical issues, this Oasis ecosystem upgrade will go ahead on 11 April 2022. Codenamed Damask, this upgrade marks an important milestone for the Oasis Network, as it sets the foundation for unlocking the network’s full capabilities.

Damask Upgrade Highlights

Damask will provide many improvements, including increased security and performance, strengthened governance mechanisms, and more decentralization. And all features of this upgrade will be implemented as part of the Oasis Core 22.1.x release series, which is a consensus protocol-breaking release.

Major features of Damask include:

• Random beacon will become more performant and scalable by transitioning the election procedure to one based on cryptographic sortition of Verifiable Random Function (VRF) outputs.
• On-Chain governance is simplified to a single unified stake threshold parameter.
• ParaTime performance is improved by simplifying the protocol (executor and storage committees are merged into a single committee), which also leads to a simplified configuration of ParaTime nodes.
• ParaTime upgrades will happen without incurring downtime by having upgrades and the descriptor changes pre-staged well in advance of the upgrade epoch.
• ParaTime packaging is enhanced by introduction of unified runtime bundles across all supported TEE types and self-describing so that configuring ParaTimes is only a matter of passing in the runtime bundle file.
• Consensus and ParaTime Communication is enhanced via support for incoming runtime messages where consensus layer transactions can trigger actions inside ParaTimes, and the addition of support for runtime messages extend the results of the emitted runtime messages with relevant information beyond indicating whether the message execution was successful or not.
• The validator pool will also increase from 110 to 120, helping further secure the Oasis Consensus Layer while also increasing decentralization.

What’s behind the name?

The naming convention for our network upgrades was voted for by our incredible community, who chose rose color themes. The names are also alphabetical. As last year’s upgrade codename was Cobalt, this year, we had to choose a name beginning with a D.

We chose Damask. The Damask Rose is a sweet-scented rose with pink or light red velvety petals and symbolizes beauty and love. Its fragrance has been captured and preserved in the form of rose water by a method that can be traced to ancient times in the Middle East and later to the Indian subcontinent.

Upgrade Details

The Damask Upgrade is scheduled to take place on Monday 11 April 2022 at 09:00 UTC.

We will provide detailed instructions for the upgrade here over the next few days.