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The release of Sapphire ParaTime will highlight the significant progress being made on the Oasis Network through 2022.

Following the successful completion of our Q1 & Q2 goals, we are excited to unveil the following significant steps Oasis will be taking to close out the year.

Primary to this is the launch of the first-ever Confidential EVM — Sapphire.

Sapphire is a groundbreaking developer environment as it is the first and only confidential EVM. The importance of having such a place to build for developers cannot be understated, as this is an elegant way for a large portion of blockchain developers to build the foundations of Web3, with privacy first.

Sapphire offers solidity developers a familiar and 99% Ethereum compatible building environment, but with the added benefits of Oasis’ privacy technology — which is key to allowing blockchain to be part of the Web3 world.

Additionally, we will bolster our existing privacy ParaTime, Cipher, with a mainnet upgrade to enable the WebAssembly-based confidential smart contracts functionality. We will also release support for SGXv2 and DCAP-based attestation to enable TEE performance improvements and support for the latest generation CPUs.

Other significant focuses for the next two quarters include inter-ParaTime communication and stabilizing of the Oasis SDK.

Sapphire on Mainnet

We are planning to launch Sapphire, the first confidential EVM, on Mainnet in the coming months.

Important highlights:

• Contract state is confidential by default.
• Contract call data can be confidential which makes Miner Extractable Value zero as you can’t front run what you can’t see.
• Stronger security and integrity guarantees as one needs to compromise secure enclaves in addition to the compute committee.
• Compatibility with existing Ethereum developer tooling. Almost no difference for developer experience and no difference for user experience compared to Ethereum.
• Additional built-in functionality for smart contracts like RNG (randomness), signing and encryption.
• New block explorer to bring improved user experience for both Emerald and Sapphire, specifically tailored to support Sapphire’s privacy features.

Cipher Mainnet Upgrade

We are also planning to upgrade the Cipher ParaTime on Mainnet to enable WebAssembly-based confidential smart contracts.

Important highlights:

• Confidential and public contract state.
• Support for more complex Rust-based libraries.
• (Some are similar as above for Sapphire, except it is not EVM.)

Support for SGXv2 and DCAP-based attestation

In order to enable TEE performance improvements and support the latest generation CPUs, we will be releasing support for SGXv2 and DCAP-based attestation in an upcoming Oasis Core release. Once fully tested on the Testnet and deployed to Mainnet, final enablement will be done through a governance proposal on the Oasis consensus layer.

Important highlights:

• Both old (EPID) and new (ECDSA) remote attestation schemes will be supported at the same time in an interoperable manner allowing upgrades to happen over time.
• Reduces the reliance on the Intel Attestation Service (IAS) thus improving availability. With DCAP-based attestations one can cache artifacts required for successful remote attestation.
• Acceptable remote attestation policy can now be defined via network and runtime governance.

Inter-ParaTime Communication

Ability to perform authenticated inter-ParaTime asset and data transfers, where security is guaranteed by the Oasis consensus layer. This will allow seamless calls between smart contracts residing on different ParaTimes, enabling e.g. Emerald, Sapphire and Cipher smart contracts to talk to each other.

Stabilizing the Oasis SDK

We are planning to stabilize the Oasis SDK which includes the ParaTime SDK used to easily build new ParaTimes, the Contract SDK used by WebAssembly smart contracts and the Client SDKs used to interact with the Oasis network and its ParaTimes from various clients (currently both Typescript and Go). We will also be improving the overall developer documentation.

Forging Ahead to Web3

This year has been an important one for the growth of the Oasis Network, and we are only halfway through. The progress we have made in launching and improving ParaTimes has been tremendous.

Emerald, our first EVM ParaTime, has opened the doors to Solidity Developers. The launch of Cipher was also a huge milestone in showcasing the potential of Oasis’ privacy-preserving technology in a blockchain setting.

Now, the launch of Sapphire is the next step towards Web3 as we take the privacy-preserving power of a ParaTime like Cipher and enable a broad spectrum of developers simple access to it so they can help build out the Web3 grounds — with Oasis.

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