The Oasis Foundation, an organization supporting the development of the Oasis Network and its ecosystem, announced today the successful deployment of the first major upgrade to the Oasis Network. Codenamed 'Cobalt’, this community-led upgrade brings powerful new tools for ParaTime and DApp developers. With this upgrade, Oasis is also announcing the launch of the Parcel SDK, a privacy-first data governance SDK that distills years of privacy research and expertise into an easy-to-use solution.

Founded with a vision of making privacy available to everyone, Oasis is building a new class of technologies that are able to protect the most sensitive data. By using Parcel SDK, developers can easily analyze data in a privacy-preserving environment, and unlock data that was previously too regulated or risky to use. Parcel is an extremely powerful tool and the SDK is already being used in partnership with Binance, BMW and Nebula Genomics among other organizations. 

“We’re excited to announce two major developments of the Oasis ecosystem, both furthering our mission of creating a responsible data economy and putting more control into the hands of everyday users,” said Jernej Kos, Director of Oasis Protocol Foundation. “Designed specifically for developers, Oasis now offers a suite of tools to create and deploy powerful applications which is helping to bridge the gap between complex privacy solutions and the everyday app developer.”

‘Cobalt Upgrade’ marks an important milestone for the Oasis Network, as it sets the foundation for unlocking the network’s full decentralized finance (DeFi) capabilities. This upgrade comes with a host of features including increased security and performance, as well as strengthened governance mechanisms and more decentralization. 

Network enhancement highlights include:

• Light Clients and Checkpoint Sync in order to make bootstrapping of new network nodes much faster.

• Random Beacon Support provides security for ParaTimes with an open admission policy.

• On-Chain Governance provides a simple framework for submitting governance proposals, validators voting on proposals, and once an upgrade proposal passes, having a way to perform the upgrade in a controlled manner, which minimizes downtime.

• ROSE Transfers Between the Consensus Layer and ParaTimes. This also means that ParaTimes get their own accounts in the consensus layer which can hold and transfer tokens.

• A path towards self-governing ParaTimes extending ParaTime governance options. 

• The validator pool will also increase from 80 to100, helping further secure the Oasis Consensus Layer while also increasing decentralization.

Now, developers can enjoy a powerful DApp development environment via the Oasis-Eth ParaTime which is entirely backwards compatible with Ethereum. With this upgrade, Oasis has become the ideal environment for developers to build applications as they benefit from a whole host of features including transaction fees that are 99% lower than Ethereum’s as well as a much higher throughput - 1,000 transactions per second. 

To help kickstart the development of projects that focus on privacy-enabled DeFi and data tokenization, developers can leverage the $1.5 million ROSE Bloom Grants Program. Each proposal is eligible to receive up to $50,000 USD in ROSE tokens. Please visit the developer portal to get started today.