Oasis Engineering Update October 2022
Our engineering team will be updating you more often with monthly news.
There is a lot of work going on behind the scenes from our engineering team, and we would like to share their progress with monthly updates.
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Following the Q3 engineering update, the team is ready to share all that happened in October.
In October, the Oasis Wallet (Web) saw several maintenance fixes, new usability, and safety features. Emerald and Cipher ParaTimes continue to be entirely stable, and while Sapphire is still on the Testnet, there have been no issues there.
Sapphire peaked in the last week of the month with over 1.7K daily transactions. Meanwhile, our Documentation is richer for two new chapters this month.
The foundation piece of the Oasis Network, Oasis Core, had a major 22.2 release with newly added support Intel SGX2 and DCAP-based attestation, improvements to on-chain governance, and TEE-based runtime security.
Read more in-depth updates below!
Wallet Updates
In October, the Oasis Wallet — Web saw a number of maintenance fixes, new usability and safety features. We merged 58 pull requests. Most notable additions and fixes (including the work on the paratimes branch):
- ParaTime transfers (#992)
- Add pop-up notifs + show a notif when an address has been copied (#1012)
- Fix error on clicking “Send” on an empty transfer (#1037)
- Migration to React 18 (#1044)
- Submit forms not just on submit button click (#1070)
- Refactor password field validation and restyle (#1080, #1081)
- Refactor HomePage buttons into ButtonLinks to improve accessibility (#1097)
- Restyle default tooltips and toast notifications (#1098)
- Convert dump_validators from jest to bash (#1113)
- Minor dependency bumps and cleanups (#997, #1011, #1015, #1034, #1054, #1059, #1060, #1062, #1063, #1065, #1067, #1068, #1069, #1071, #1072, #1073, #1074, #1075, #1077, #1078, #1082, #1083, #1084, #1085, #1086, #1087, #1088, #1089, #1090, #1092, #1095, #1099, #1100, #1101, #1102, #1103, #1104, #1105, #1106, #1109, #1111, #1115, #1116, #1121)
Paratime Updates
- Throughout October, the Emerald and Cipher ParaTimes were stable both on Mainnet and Testnet. Sapphire has not been deployed on the Mainnet yet, but is running without major issues on Testnet. No downtimes or other incidents have been reported.
- Testnet saw a successful upgrade to the new major release of the Oasis Core, 22.2.
- Emerald on the Mainnet saw the daily peak of 18827 transactions on 13 October. On average, there were roughly 14k transactions daily, seeing a small decrease from September.
- Sapphire on the Testnet had a peak of (confidential) transactions in the last week of the Oasis Sapphire Hackathon surpassing 1.7k transactions daily Oct 14–21. No network or ParaTime-related issues were reported.
- 53 nodes are running Emerald ParaTime on Mainnet as of Oct 31.
- 28 nodes are running Cipher ParaTime on Mainnet as of Oct 31.
Developer Platform and Paratime Updates
In October an important change was made to the gas cost model of the WASM smart contracts used by the Cipher ParaTime. A thorough benchmarking was performed of different computation-intensive, crypto-intensive and storage-intensive contracts and the new gas costs now more realistically reflect the actual resources (#1015).
Another important exposure of Deoxys-II and X25519 has been done in the Oasis SDK Contracts module (#1152). Both are the underlying primitives for encrypting the transactions and performing confidential computation. By exposing them, the WASM smart contracts and EVM precompiles can now use them to efficiently sign and encrypt data on-chain.
Altogether, 22 pull requests have been merged into the Oasis SDK:
- Update gas costs (#1015, #1161)
- examples: Migrate code snippets from .md files to separate sources (#1125)
- Expose x25519 key derivation and deoxysii to wasm contracts (#1152)
- gen_runtime_vectors: Sync with ADR14 (#1157)
- ts-web/core: switch back to newly fixed getName (#1162)
- ts-web/core: docs additions (#1163, #1165)
- runtime-sdk/callformat: randomize deoxysii nonce in simulation (#1171)
- runtime-sdk: Do not run global state migrations in queries (#1175)
- Minor version bumps and fixes (#1083, #1131, #1134, #1139, #1146, #1148, #1149, #1155, #1158, #1180, #1182, #1184)
On the Sapphire front, the most notable new feature is support for Hardhat by introducing the new @oasisprotocol/sapphire-hardhat npm package. Find out more in the Hardhat section of the Sapphire Quickstart tutorial. A total of 9 pull requests have merged into the Sapphire ParaTime in October.
Work on the Oasis Indexer continued with high pace. Support for the basic consensus transactions has been added and the focus moved to supporting Emerald transactions. 35 PRs have been merged.
The Documentation is richer for two new chapters:
- The Oasis Web3 gateway tutorial describes how to set up the web3 gateway for your own instance of the Emerald or Sapphire ParaTime
- The Sapphire Precompiles page describes the all new x25519 library which can be imported and called from your smart contract to encrypt data such as logs and events.
Core Platform Updates
A new major release of Oasis Core, 22.2, was made. Users are encouraged to read the extensive Change Log and test it on our Testnet. When the release will be proven safe and stable, we will announce the adoption on the Mainnet.
The most notable new feature is support for the Intel SGX2 and DCAP-based attestation. This enables running Oasis network on the new generation of Xeon processors while preserving support for the older models. Other features include the archive mode, roothash incoming messages for runtimes which allows instructing specific actions for the underlying ParaTime, a number of networking performance tweaks, extensions to the on-chain governance, dynamic key manager configuration for ParaTimes, more descriptive and human-friendly status of the Oasis node and improved ParaTime logging using the Oasis node’s logging mechanisms.
For the exchange operators, the Oasis Rosetta Gateway has also been bumped recently to 2.3.0 which supports the new Oasis Core 22.2 release.
