The first half of 2024 is almost finished and we’d like to give the community a brief overview of all the great and exciting things that were achieved in the first half of the year and what's in store for the remaining half. We're going to go through some of the past highlights and cover what's planned for the next six months in terms of engineering, BD, community initiatives, etc. We also recognize the great feedback that we're getting from our community on how to make the UX and DevX of Oasis better, so we’ll be covering the steps we're taking to make it happen.

So let's dive into the past, present and the next six months of exciting developments for Oasis and our community.
First, here is a brief overview of what we have achieved so far this year.

Oasis 2024: First Half

Brand Refresh and AI focus

AI has been growing in momentum and adoption, quickly becoming one of the most prominent sectors of Web3. From its inception, Oasis has been built with the future privacy needs of the AI and Personal Data industry in mind. With the AI industry now maturing, we are excited to make this a focus point for the Network in 2024. There have been developments such as the upcoming release of Runtime Offchain Logic (ROFL), an AI-exclusive BD division, dedicated AI grants to builders, attendance of prominent AI conferences, onboarding the founder of Ocean Protocol Trent McConaghy as a strategic advisor, refreshed website with AI focused branding and some exciting collaborations to be announced. Building upon these initiatives into the second half of 2024 will ensure that we’ll be heard loud and clear across both Web2 and Web3.

ETHDam, General Marketing and Events

Alongside our new AI initiative and branding, our team also significantly ramped up our conference presence and community initiatives. We were thrilled to be the Flagship Sponsor of ETHDam this year, which gave considerable exposure to the privacy-focused and developer-orientated part of the Web3 community, establishing our position as the leading privacy protocol in the space. Oasis was plastered across every screen in Amsterdam Central station over the weekend, giving in excess of 700,000 sets of eyes over our messaging and brand refresh. The building, inside and out, was draped in Oasis blue.

During ETHDam, there were many main stage talks, a highly successful hackathon with the Build Natively on Sapphire bounty and prime positioning of our booth, where many great connections were made — many of which are still in the works.

The first day of ETHDam was also the launch of the Oasis branding refresh, giving our website, branding, marketing plans and more a fresh look, alongside the announcement of the ROFL development.

Conferences are a vital part of establishing a presence in the market, inviting developers, founders and decision makers, marketeers, and everyone else in between to share the Web3 excitement. We’ll be continuing to attend some exciting conferences throughout the rest of the year, some of which are still to be announced, the conferences we previously attended:

• ETHDenver: February
• ETHDam: April
• Dappcon: May
• ETHBelgrade: June
• ETHCC: July (Sign up to our Rendez-Vous event on July 9th here)
• More to come

Finally, our recent collaboration with Revolut and their Learn and Earn Program, we are happy to share that since the beginning of the program, almost 1 million users have completed at least one Learn and Earn lesson, with the majority being new participants. Out of the projects listed, Oasis was one of the most popular projects, allowing participants to earn and hold a considerable amount of ROSE rewards.

Stay tuned for more initiatives from the Events and Marketing team in the second half of 2024 and beyond, with plenty more to come.

Partnerships and Business Development

The first half of 2024 has already seen a diverse group of ecosystem launches. illumineX is a cross-chain confidential exchange platform launched in February 2024, with their exciting V2 product due to launch this summer, perfectly demonstrating how our privacy technology can work beyond just our native ecosystem. Another launch was Pontus-X, the first third-party custom ParaTime to be built on Oasis by deltaDAO. It will offer an enterprise solution for corporate clients such as Airbus and Exaion, the French division of EDFenergy, integrating EU-regulated e-money EUROe tokens to meet the regulatory requirements for compliant privacy in data and AI.

Next is Predictoor, built by Ocean Protocol, which is an AI-based prediction dApp built natively on Sapphire for its smart-privacy features. Predictions are one of the most essential things we rely on every day, from weather predictions, traffic predictions and also one of the key aspects of financial markets, will a certain stock/coin/currency go up or down in value. There is value in predictions and in order to be able to monetize that value in a decentralized and trustless way, on-chain privacy for private storage and private compute is essential. That is why Sapphire is such a perfect fit for Predictoor with monthly volumes approaching $1B in value. As we deepen our collaboration with Ocean, we expect to see even more Ocean products utilize Sapphire privacy capabilities.

With the popularity of memecoins on the rise, we were excited to see the community get behind and show support for the launch of the first memecoin on Sapphire, Rosy. Rosy is a lovable bulldog who currently has a deflationary staking mechanic deployed but will also have more utility built into the project, such as a tamagotchi style game looking to utilize AI, as the project progresses.

We are also pleased to announce that Oasis has officially joined the Decentralized Confidential Compute (DeCC) initiative, aligning us with a consortium of respected blockchain entities committed to advancing confidential and verifiable computation. The DeCC, similar in purpose to Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePin), brings together industry leaders to foster a secure and private computational environment across decentralized networks. Our ethos has always been to improve privacy and security within the blockchain and Web3 space, leveraging our strengths outside of the Oasis ecosystem. Our involvement looks to enhance privacy and security across the blockchain ecosystem, leveraging our strengths to contribute to this pioneering community.

In the graphic below, you can see even more incredible partnerships, some are grant recipients and some are community projects that have collaborated with Oasis in 2024:
‍

‍

Beyond this list, there are many new exciting partnerships in the works with plenty to be announced throughout the rest of the year.

So with that brief recap of our year out of the way, let us move onto the initiatives we will be focusing on for the rest of 2024.

Oasis 2024: Second Half

User experience

With these recent partnerships and the continued growth and adoption of the network, we have also received feedback about removing friction for both developers and dApp users within our ecosystem. This has led to great progress in improving our developer documentations, tooling, and libraries, and will make it far easier for the next wave of developers to begin building on our network. While decreasing friction for developers is incredibly important for the future mass adoption of the network, it is only one piece of the puzzle. It is clear that significant improvements are also needed on the UX side for our users.

Based on our observations and the feedback that we have received from the community, we have deemed the following three initiatives to be priorities across the organization. Our goal is to abstract away wallet complexities such as moving from a CEX to the Oasis Consensus layer (ROSE Wallet) and then require users to bridge again to the Oasis Sapphire network (Metamask wallet).

This can be a complicated process for new users, which is more challenging than what users are accustomed to when interacting with other prominent blockchain networks. We plan to eliminate this main user friction in the following ways:

1. CEX integration of Sapphire: Direct deposits and withdrawals between the Oasis Sapphire Network and prominent centralized exchanges is perhaps the most impactful way we can solve user onboarding friction moving forward. In doing so, the majority of users would no longer need to interact with the consensus layer and ROSE Wallet. These CEX integrations will also pave the way for Oasis Sapphire dApps to have their tokens listed on exchanges; further enhancing their reach and potential user base.
   
   This is a clear next step on the path of mass adoption and as such will be a priority for our BD team, with some integrations already in the final steps of contract negotiation.
   ‍
2. ‍Oasis built dApp and/or Metamask Snap to ease CEX —> Sapphire transfers: We are currently exploring two options to give our users currently holding ROSE on a CEX as an alternative method to onboard to Sapphire, without having to use the consensus layer ROSE Wallet. The first option is an easy to use dApp that you connect your Metamask to, this can then generate an oasis1 address, which you input to a CEX to withdraw to. The dApp would then automatically route your ROSE straight from the CEX to Sapphire without a user having to touch the Rose Wallet.
   ‍
   The second option under consideration is a Metamask Snap, while offering similar utility, this can also have more complex features integrated allowing encrypted transactions to be handled directly within Metamask and more. We’ll be carefully evaluating the implementation and user experience of both and decide on the best course of action to ensure we bring the best solution to our community.

3. Interactive onboarding page on our website: This will serve as a one-stop-shop for users looking for any guidance in handling their ROSE and using the ecosystem. Users follow a series of questions to identify the step or stage they next need to complete. Users will then be guided through these steps in a clear and precise manner, accompanied by short videos for those that prefer more of a visual aid. As CEX integrations come, the guide will be kept up to date to ensure users can easily follow the right path for them.

Liquid Staking

By offering liquid staking at a high level, we will further enhance the abstraction of the consensus layer away from our users. Now, even those that wish to stake on the network, will be able to do so directly through a Sapphire smart contract. Ecosystem users will never have to leave the Oasis Sapphire Network or download an additional wallet even if they wish to participate in staking and securing the Oasis Consensus.

Liquid staking will also open up a myriad of options across the ecosystem improving the user experience and expanding the potential use cases possible. This is now available on test net through our ecosystem partner Accumulated Finance, with main net release over the coming months.

Business Development

You may have noticed a more recent flurry of announcements and partnerships secured regarding business development; the month of May brought in six new partnerships. Due to the expansion of our BD team, this has allowed us to not only diversify our focus and cast a wider net, but also engage in considerable outreach and field the inbound enquiries effectively.

We also now have a division specifically focused on AI, as this is undoubtedly going to be a substantial part of the world’s technological advancements over the coming years and which we are planning to be an integral part of. As always, we’ll be maintaining our continued focus on account abstraction, key management, chain abstraction, cross chain privacy, DeFi and everything else in between. Additionally we will be looking to integrate another bridge expanding the OPL value proposition and helping us to connect with and empower more dApps and ecosystems across Web3.

We are pleased to share that our BD team are firing on all cylinders and there will be plenty more to keep your eye out for over the coming months.

We’d also like to congratulate Oasis Labs on the recent evolution of their partnership with Google; exciting times for privacy in general!

Team Expansion

To ensure we’ve adequate resources to deliver on our exciting next steps, we have made additional hires to our team. Several new BD members, a project manager, marketing manager, events manager, UX specialist and two additional community moderators. We’re also engaged with several PR and KOL agencies to complement our own team’s fantastic skill set. Our expansion will continue further, however, as we’ve added several new roles to equip us with the extra firepower, of which several individuals are in process to fulfill.

‍
If you think you’ve the skills and passion to be a part of this journey, check out our open positions.

Mobile Wallet

We will also be releasing the long awaited mobile ROSE Wallet. With the mobile wallet, we will give additional options to our mobile first users, who prefer to do operations on the consensus layer natively for storage, staking and Paratime transfers.

General and Quality of Life

There are some things outside a project’s direct ability to influence, but many things do fall under a project’s control to improve user experience. Having listened to feedback, we’re pleased to confirm we’ll be adding the below (amongst other developments that are still TBA):

• Easily visible staking rewards on the explorer and wallet
• Improvements to documentation and guides
• V2 release of the website with several upgrades and additional pages
• A new cohort of Sentinels through our ambassador program to strengthen the ranks
• Active engagement with T1 PR firms
• A more open and engaged dialogue with senior team members through Town Hall events, blogs, and AMAs
• More community and ecosystem-centric events

After some incredible progress in the first half of 2024, the work is far from over. We have received some great feedback from the community in the areas that still need improvement, which has guided us to create some ambitious goals, including technical advancements to improve UX, new use cases, new BD initiatives and an expanded team, which will help us in our mission to bring trustless, decentralized privacy and self-sovereignty to the Web3 and AI industries.

We sincerely thank you for being on this journey with us and supporting us every step of the way, and we look forward to further connecting with the community as we navigate this wild ride of Web3 together.