The Oasis Bytes Whiteboard Series

Introducing Nimble: A new approach to scalability

This week, we’re publishing our first ever whiteboard series — Oasis Bytes. In these videos we’ll discuss the Oasis architecture, confidentiality and availability in compute and storage, and Nimble, our new approach to scalability. If you’d like to skip straight to the nitty-gritty details, check out our whitepaper on Nimble here.

Introducing the Oasis Network

In this first video, you’ll get a bird-eyes-view of the Oasis Network and its various components. We start by considering a transaction submitted to the Oasis network. Originating from a client in a frontend application, transactions are submitted to the Transaction Scheduler Committee, which takes all transactions from various clients, forms them into batches, and dispatches each batch to compute committees. These groups of transactions are then processed in parallel by each committee (more on that below), and through a consensus process are submitted to storage on the blockchain.

Confidential Compute on the Oasis Network

One of the unique characteristics of the Oasis Network is its ability to keep data and transactions confidential. In this video we discuss how Oasis is able to provide both availability and confidentiality through the use of encryption and secure enclaves like SGX.

Separating Consensus from Compute

One of the biggest challenges to blockchain today is performance. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Nimble, our new approach to scalability. In this video we’ll discuss a critical component of Nimble: separating consensus, compute, and storage. This separation allows for a more diverse set of hardware to participate in the network, but more importantly means that contracts can be executed in parallel — improving the overall speed of the network. Check out the video to learn more!

Horizontal Scaling on the Oasis Network

In this video we deep dive into how the Oasis Network is able to compute transactions in parallel. By checking if transactions conflict with each other, the Oasis network is able to group transactions into batches in such a way that changing the compute order of said batches won’t change the outcome. This allows each batch to be processed in parallel across multiple compute committees while preserving transactional semantics.

Horizontal Scaling vs Sharding

Sharding is a common scaling technique in blockchain, but comes with some limitations. In this video we explore each approach to scalability and discuss how increasing the size of the compute pool for a network using Horizontal Scaling allows for more parallelism — increasing the overall performance of the network.

If you’d like to learn more about the Oasis Network and our new approach to scaling, Nimble, check out our whitepaper here.

For more info on Oasis Labs go to www.oasislabs.com or email us at info@oasislabs.com.