Year in Review: The Oasis Network in 2023

The Oasis Network experienced radical and transformational growth each month in 2023. Here’s a look back at what happened.

Oasis

Dec 26, 2023

Roadmap

The past 12 months have been a fundamentally transformational period for the Oasis Network.

Throughout 2023, all of the developers, creators, partners and other members of the community who worked with various branches of the core Oasis Foundation team contributed to nothing less than a game-changing era in the growth of privacy for Web3, powered by Oasis.

Although it’s impossible to recount every notable and celebratory moment from the past year, this article notes a multitude of high-profile events, products, partnerships and more that set the Oasis Network apart from the crowd in 2023 and up for success in 2024.

Engineering: What was built?

Better privacy won’t build itself, and the engineering teams at Oasis understand this. Everything accomplished this year was guided by the 2023 roadmap published at the start of the year.

Oasis Sapphire, in particular — the only production-ready confidential EVM in 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 at Oasis Engineering in this interview with Jernej Kos, Director of the Oasis Foundation.

Beyond these highlights, a few specific projects demonstrate the accomplishments of Oasis Engineering 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. Read more about it here.
Developer Experience Improvements: Chasing developer friendliness for writing confidential dApps, the Oasis Documentation is richer for three new Sapphire subchapters (Gasless transaction, View-call authentication, Security handbook), the Oasis Privacy Layer chapter, the complete Oasis CLI guide, a new API reference page and the Oasis Playground hosting and indexing 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 (ZKP) primitives for Ethereum-compatible zkSNARK circuits, which implemented EIP-196 and EIP-197. It also added the ECADD, ECMUL and ECPAIRING opcodes. Read more about it here.

Readers who want to dive deeper into the past year of engineering at Oasis are invited to review the monthly reports from Oasis engineers published on the Oasis blog.

‍Products: What shipped?

Beyond core protocol improvements around security optimizations, developer experience improvements and more, the technical teams at the Oasis Foundation were shipping continuous improvements for essential ecosystem products and services like the Oasis Wallet, Oasis Explorer, Oasis Nexus and other projects.

Most notably, the long-awaited launch of the Oasis Privacy Layer and the Sapphire runtime arrived during the Oasis Rendezvous at EthCC in Paris. Read more about the various internal product development teams at the Oasis Foundation in this interview with Oasis Engineering Director Tadej Janež.

Explore more highlights about each product that was launched and upgraded this year!

Oasis Sapphire: The first and only production-ready confidential EVM-compatible platform.
Oasis Privacy Layer: The plug-and-play programmable wrapper for Sapphire.
Oasis Wallet: The official non-custodial web wallet with new features, interfaces, and integrations.
Oasis Nexus: A native indexer and conduit for accessing onchain data from Oasis.
Oasis Explorer: The official search engine for querying onchain data from Oasis users.

‍Partners: Who joined the ecosystem?

Oasis saw a landmark year of new partnerships and integrations with colleagues across all corners of the Web3 industry. Each of these teams, although their use cases differ widely, represents the same desire to normalize the adoption of versatile and robust privacy technology across all crypto-native applications.

Here’s a rundown of teams that worked with Oasis last year.

Personal.ai integrated Sapphire to enable secure data encryption, consent-backed access, minting confidential NFTs for AI avatars and transparent tracking of data and avatar usage.
Covalent enhances Web3 user experience by providing Sapphire developers with better access to historical data through Covalent’s Unified API. This helps to create confidential dApps with comprehensive data control.
Ocean Protocol’s Predictoor tapped Sapphire for its privacy features to protect user data on Ocean when providing and making onchain predictions.
Oraichain brings Oasis privacy tools into the Cosmos ecosystem.
SYNTHR introduced syROSE, a synthetic asset of the native Oasis Network asset.
Crust Network is using Sapphire’s privacy features to secure and customizable Web3 data storage.

CoinSender is using Sapphire privacy to overhaul Web3 payments and token disbursements.
illumineX launched the first confidential DEX on Sapphire.

A long list of tools and features were integrated into the Oasis ecosystem tool.

Chainstack simplifies Web3 user experience for Sapphire node operators.
Oasis integrated Celer’s cBridge onto the Sapphire mainnet, giving Sapphire decentralized and non-custodial asset bridge capabilities.
Oasis also integrated Celer’s Interchain Messaging framework on Sapphire.
Oasis Safe via ProtoFire was deployed on Sapphire, offering a secure and customizable asset management tool.
Woo3 protocol’s voting tool supported community votes in the Oasis ecosystem.
Transak worked with Oasis to offer seamless onboarding 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. Over 400,000 members chatting with each other across 30 regional channels comprise the core of this network. Oasis developer channels grew by a factor of 10 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 also aims to be a wide-reaching gateway to everything in Web3, even if it’s not built on the Oasis Network. Read more about how new users can join Web3 through the Oasis ecosystem here.

‍Events: Where did Oasis go?

All core teams at the Oasis Foundation traveled widely to an array 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 are using Oasis. At the Oasis Rendezvous in Paris, for example, a record audience attended workshops, panels, presentations and informal discussions about privacy in Web3. Consensus, DappCon, SmartCon, EthCC, DevConnect and a total of 37 virtual events hosted online that brought Oasis to the Web3 world.

One particular event stands above all the rest, however. Privacy4Web3 (P4W3) was the inaugural Oasis hackathon event that saw thousands of registered attendees workshop ideas for Web3 applications and technical standards for integrating good privacy and good data security into Web3.

Winners for the hackathon were segmented into four (4) categories:

Best applications on Oasis Sapphire
Best applications that use the Oasis Privacy Layer
Best use of Oasis Sapphire for scaling privacy
Best ecosystem tutorials and standards

Every winning submission was accompanied by a comprehensive project description and video demonstration. Read more about the 2023 P4W3 winners here.

‍Growth: What’s the message?

As the market’s leading voice in Web3 privacy, the Oasis team and community care deeply about maximizing the reach and impact of their mission to bring confidentiality to crypto. With tens of millions of social media impressions, earned media mentions worth millions of dollars in advertising spend, hundreds of thousands of Twitter mentions, thousands of hours from visitors reading the Oasis blog and more, the Oasis brand is tirelessly working to evangelize all demographics of Web3 natives about the importance of privacy.

Check out some of the best-performing posts on the Oasis blog from 2023:

The Oasis Foundation team also welcomed two key leaders into its ranks in 2023.

Patrick Degenhardt, Head of Marketing & 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 across developer relations, operations, business development and more. See a complete list of open roles here!

Solving Web3 privacy should not be expensive, complex nor rigid. Achieving mainstream adoption through a safer user experience with better developer tools is why Oasis builds the best privacy technology Web3 can offer. Sapphire, the Oasis Privacy Layer (OPL) and other protocols and products are a doorway for effective privacy open to anyone. 2023 saw the Oasis ecosystem move toward this goal by leaps and bounds.

2024 will accelerate this mission even faster — a full yearly roadmap will be published soon.

Web3 privacy will never be the same with Smart Privacy powered by Oasis.