The last 12 months have been a period of fundamental transformation for Oasis Network.
Throughout 2023, all the developers, creators, partners, and other community members working with various branches of the Oasis Foundation core team contributed to nothing less than a revolutionary era in privacy growth for Web3, powered by Oasis.
While it's impossible to recount every notable and celebratory moment from the past year, this article highlights a multitude of high-profile events, products, partnerships and more that set Oasis Network apart from the crowd in 2023 and set it up for success in 2024.
Engineering: What was built?
Better privacy doesn't build itself, and Oasis engineering teams understand that. Everything done this year was guided by the 2023 roadmap published at the beginning of the year.
Oasis Sapphire, in particular, the only production-ready confidential EVM on Web3, grew by a factor of 45. Commits to the Oasis Core repository increased to a lifetime total of 8,698 this year – busy is an understatement! Read about behind the scenes of Oasis Engineering in this interview with Jernej Kos, Director of the Oasis Foundation.
Beyond these highlights, a few specific projects demonstrate Oasis Engineering's accomplishments from the past year. In no particular order, some of these crowning achievements are:
The Eden Upgrade: In early November, Oasis announced its landmark network upgrade, called Eden, which introduced a litany of security, performance, and interoperability improvements to the protocol.
Developer experience improvements: Seeking ease of use for developers to write sensitive dApps, Oasis documentation is richer with three new Sapphire subchapters (gasless transaction, Vew-call authentication, security manual), chapter Oasis Privacy Layer, The Complete Oasis CLI Guide, A New API. reference page and Oasis Playground hosts and indexes a number of working examples with full source code available that can serve as a good starting point for your confidential dApp.
Zero-Knowledge Proof Integration: The Oasis Runtime SDK added zero-knowledge proof primitives (ZKP) for Ethereum-compatible zkSNARK circuits, which implemented EIP-196 and EIP-197. Also added the ECADD, ECMUL and ECPAIRING opcodes.
Products: What was shipped?
Beyond core protocol improvements around security optimizations, developer experience improvements, and more, Oasis Foundation technical teams were rolling out continuous improvements to essential ecosystem products and services like Oasis Wallet, Oasis Explorer, Oasis Nexus and other projects.
Notably, the long-awaited release of Oasis Privacy Layer and the Sapphire runtime arrived during the Oasis Rendezvous at EthCC in Paris.
Explore more highlights of each product that was launched and updated this year!
Oasis Sapphire – The first and only production-ready EVM-compatible confidential platform.
Oasis Privacy Layer – The plug-and-play scriptable wrapper for Sapphire.
Oasis Wallet – The official non-custodial web wallet with new features, interfaces and integrations.
Oasis Nexus: a native indexer and conduit to access data in the Oasis chain.
Oasis Explorer - The official search engine for querying Oasis user thread data.
Partners: Who joined the ecosystem?
Oasis experienced a historic year of new partnerships and integrations with colleagues in all corners of the Web3 industry. Each of these teams, while their use cases differ widely, represent the same desire to normalize the adoption of versatile and robust privacy technology across crypto-native applications.
Here's a rundown of the teams that worked with Oasis last year.
Personal.ai integrated Sapphire to enable secure data encryption, consent-backed access, creation of confidential NFTs for AI avatars, and transparent tracking of avatar data and usage.
Covalent improves the Web3 user experience by giving Sapphire developers better access to historical data through Covalent's unified API. This helps create confidential dApps with comprehensive data control.
Ocean Protocol's Predictoor turned to Sapphire for its privacy features to protect user data on Ocean by providing and performing on-chain predictions.
Oraichain brings Oasis privacy tools to the Cosmos ecosystem.
SYNTHR introduced syROSE, a synthetic asset from Oasis Network's native asset.
Crust Network uses Sapphire's privacy features for secure and customizable Web3 data storage.
CoinSender is using Sapphire Privacy to review Web3 payments and token disbursements.
IlluminateX launched the first confidential DEX on Sapphire.
A long list of tools and functions have been integrated into the Oasis ecosystem tool.
Chainstack simplifies the Web3 user experience for Sapphire node operators.
Oasis integrated Celer's cBridge into Sapphire's mainnet, providing Sapphire with decentralized and non-custodial asset bridging capabilities.
Oasis also integrated Celer's Interchain messaging framework into Sapphire.
Oasis Safe through ProtoFire has been implemented on Sapphire and offers a secure and customizable asset management tool.
The Woo3 protocol voting tool supported community votes in the Oasis ecosystem.
Transak worked with Oasis to deliver a seamless integration into the Oasis ecosystem for new users.
Community: Who supports privacy?
Oasis is proud to be supported by a global network of privacy enthusiasts who are committed to building a better Web3 for the world. More than 400,000 members who talk to each other through 30 regional channels constitute the core of this network. Oasis developer channels grew 10x this year. To accelerate the growth of all aspects of the Oasis community, the Foundation launched several new initiatives for the global Oasis ecosystem, including:
Oasis Odyssey – A community program with over 80,000 applicants.
Oasis Academy: An educational program with 4,000 students in the first month.
Oasis Sentinels – An ambassador program with over 900 candidates.
Oasis is also intended to be a wide-ranging gateway to everything in Web3, even if it's not built on the Oasis Network.
Events: Where did Oasis go?
All Oasis Foundation core teams traveled extensively to a variety of industry events in 2023. Beyond connecting with other builders, creators, and founders, these events created environments for dialogue about what Oasis is building and how builders They are using Oasis.
At the Oasis Rendezvous in Paris, for example, a record audience attended workshops, panels, presentations and informal discussions on privacy on the Web3.
Consensus, DappCon, SmartCon, EthCC, DevConnect and a total of 37 virtual events organized online that brought Oasis to the Web3 world.
However, there is one event in particular that stands out above all others. Privacy4Web3 (P4W3) was the inaugural Oasis hackathon event where thousands of registered attendees participated in workshops on ideas for Web3 applications and technical standards for integrating good privacy and data security into Web3.
The hackathon winners were divided into four (4) categories:
Best Apps on Oasis Sapphire
The best apps that use the Oasis privacy layer
Best Use of Oasis Sapphire to Expand Privacy
The best tutorials and standards in the ecosystem.
Each winning entry was accompanied by a full project description and video demonstration.
Growth: What is the message?
As the market-leading voice in Web3 privacy, the Oasis team and community care deeply about maximizing the reach and impact of its mission to bring confidentiality to cryptocurrencies.
With tens of millions of social media impressions, millions of dollars' worth of advertising spend earned in media mentions, hundreds of thousands of Twitter mentions, thousands of hours of visitors reading the Oasis blog, and more, the Oasis brand is working tirelessly to evangelize all Web3 Native demographics about the importance of privacy.
Check out some of the best-performing Oasis blog posts of 2023:
Six integrations that will shape Oasis in 2023 and beyond
Four ways to compare TEE and ZKP
The future of account abstraction with Oasis
Oasis offers the privacy SocialFi needs to succeed
The Oasis Foundation team also welcomed two key leaders to its ranks in 2023.
Patrick Degenhardt, Director of Marketing and Community
Niv Aviram, Head of Business Development
The Oasis Foundation team is always growing and there's something for everyone passionate about privacy with open roles in developer relations, operations, business development and more.
Addressing privacy on the Web3 should not be expensive, complex, or rigid. Achieving widespread adoption through a more secure user experience with better development tools is why Oasis creates the best privacy technology Web3 has to offer.
Sapphire, Oasis Privacy Layer (OPL) and other protocols and products are a gateway to effective privacy open to all. In 2023, the Oasis ecosystem moved towards this goal in leaps and bounds.
The year 2024 will accelerate this mission even faster: a full annual roadmap will be published soon.
Web3 privacy will never be the same with Smart Privacy powered by Oasis.
