Oasis Engineering Update: December & January 2022
It’s here: Our monthly update on all things technical!
Welcome to our roundup of what the Oasis Network team have been working on, take a moment to catch up with all the latest developments.
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TOWARDS THE NEXT MAJOR NETWORK UPGRADE
Main features that will be introduced are:
- VRF-based committee elections.
- Simplified governance quorum/threshold calculation to improve the passing rate of network upgrade governance proposals.
- Improved performance of ParaTime committees by simplifying the protocol (merged executor and storage committees) and opening the way for even more improvements on the ParaTime side. This will also lead to simplified configuration of ParaTime nodes.
- Support for incoming runtime messages where consensus layer transactions can trigger actions inside ParaTimes.
- Support for seamless ParaTime upgrades without downtime.
- Framework support for liquid staking in ParaTimes, enabling ParaTimes to get the required information in order to track staking rewards.
WALLET UPDATES
Development of our Oasis Wallet — Web continues at a rapid pace.
In December and January, we merged 67 pull requests.
Notable improvements are:
- To prevent users from saving the wrong mnemonic words when they create a new wallet — Disable Google Translate on mnemonic words & Force users to type the whole mnemonic (or copy and paste it).
- Simplify import via mnemonic by seamlessly handling double spaces and newlines.
- Hide private key by default when importing a wallet.
- Warn users if they want to send tokens to a known validator address (instead of delegating them).
- Add notification and FAQ entry for BitPie users on how they can import their BitPie private key and seamlessly use Oasis Wallet — Web.
- Explain Ledger-related errors in a human-friendly way.
- Use different icons for different transaction types.
- Make stack traces (in case of errors) more readable which will enable us to resolve issues faster in the future.
Likewise, development of our Oasis Wallet — Browser Extension is in full steam. In December and January, we merged 44 pull requests and released versions 1.0.0, 1.1.0, 1.2.0 and 1.3.1.
Notable improvements are:
- You can now deposit and withdraw into/from select ParaTimes, starting with Oasis’s Cipher and Emerald.
- Emerald deposit and withdraw (and other select ParaTime transactions) now show up in your consensus account’s transaction history.
- Brought ParaTime transaction hashing in sync with Oasis Scan block explorer.
- Support for the latest version 2.3.2 of the Oasis app on Ledger.
- To prevent users from saving the wrong mnemonic words when they create a new wallet, disable Google Translate on mnemonic words.
- Generate stronger 24-word mnemonics by default.
- Warn users if they want to send tokens to a known validator address (instead of delegating them).
- Warn users on ParaTime withdraws to accounts they don’t own.
- Stop the password entry field from erasing spaces between words.
- Transfers to your account in the transaction history list now show the address that sent it.
PARATIME UPDATES
Wormhole Bridge integration into the Emerald ParaTime has been live since Jan 11.
The Emerald ParaTime has seen significant usage growth in January. To support the high demand we’ve released two Emerald updates in January, namely Emerald 6.1.0 and Emerald 6.2.0, which:
- Enable Emerald nodes to set a non-zero minimum gas price.
- Properly consider transaction gas limits when scheduling batches.
- Implement a new transaction scheduler that is aware how much gas transactions actually use to be able to pack blocks efficiently.
56 nodes are running Emerald ParaTime on Mainnet.
43 nodes are running Cipher ParaTime on Mainnet.
PARATIME DEVELOPMENT
We added support for ParaTimes to take control of batch scheduling, opening up possibilities like dynamic scheduling based on resource use, transaction aggregation, enforcing a TEE-based schedule, etc.
DEVELOPER PLATFORM UPDATES
Our Solidity-based smart contract development environment is available on the Emerald ParaTime on the Mainnet.
The Emerald Web3 gateway that allows legacy Ethereum applications to talk to Emerald without requiring modifications has seen its major 1.0.0 release on Jan 12.
We’ve also launched Emerald Block Explorer, our custom version of the BlockScout block explorer, at https://explorer.emerald.oasis.dev/.
Our WebAssembly-based smart contracts development environment is deployed on the Cipher ParaTime on the Testnet.
We’ve released a new Smart Contracts Guide where you will learn:
- How to prepare your environment for Cipher smart contract development
- How to develop smart contracts in Rust using Oasis SDK
- How to compile Rust smart contracts into Wasm.
- How to deploy Wasm smart contract binaries to Cipher using the new Oasis CLI.
CORE PLATFORM UPDATES
Development of Oasis Core is in full swing as we are working towards Oasis Core 22.0 release, a major release that will power the upcoming Consensus layer upgrade to version 5.0.0.
In December and January, we merged 47 pull requests. Notable improvements are:
- VRF based committee elections (#4248)
- Removal of separate storage nodes (#4308)
- Incoming runtime messages (ADR: #4327, implementation: #4415)
- Runtime message results (ADR: #4392)
- New governance mechanism with a single unified threshold replacing the existing quorum + threshold mechanism (#4428)
- Support for runtime schedule control (#4438)
- Consensus vote status subcommand (#4400)
- Software version in node’s descriptor (#4400)
