Oasis Engineering Update | August 2025

August was a full month for the Oasis engineering team, with steady progress across platform improvements, infrastructure upgrades, and various protocol enhancements. This roundup shares the latest developments, technical updates, and new capabilities that continue to strengthen the network. Let’s dive in!

Wallet & CLI Updates

First up, the ROSE Wallet team made a new maintenance 2.4.0 release on August 25. The wallet sidebar was revisited and is now made sticky to correctly fit all screens (#2197). The release also includes a workaround for the faulty Ledger firmware (#2205, #2201). Finally, we received news from Transak that, due to regulatory issues concerning privacy-centric blockchains, they needed to delist ROSE. The integration of Transak for fiat on-ramp was thus also removed in the new release (#2196).

The Oasis CLI team brought exciting new features this month. The Oasis CLI can now be installed through the Homebrew package manager on Mac and Linux (#565). For manual installations, the auto-updater was integrated into the CLI (#552, #565). Users can simply run “oasis update” and it will check for a new version, show a change log, and perform an upgrade, if confirmed. Keep in mind that this only works for manual installations. If installed via package manager, this command is disabled.

The rest of the CLI work was related to ROFL. The ability to import secrets from a dot env file was added by invoking the new “oasis rofl secret import” command (#571). ROFL-based apps now support direct access to the network ports via the ROFL proxy running on the provider’s node (#569). The “oasis rofl machine show” command now lists any exposed ports by the ROFL app. A new “oasis rofl machine change-admin” command was introduced that hands over the administration of a ROFL machine to another entity (#582, #574).

Please note that this action differs from changing the admin of the ROFL deployed app. When deploying an app on ROFL, the expiration date of the machine is now also printed with a hint for the “oasis rofl top-up” command that extends the rental period (#561). Both Docker and Podman are now supported for building the ROFL bundle (#559). The “--no-docker” flag was consequently renamed to “--no-container”. Last, a potential vulnerability was fixed while building a ROFL bundle, where symlinks within the template archive could access and potentially change the host’s file system (#572, #587).

The team made three new releases: a breaking 0.15.0 release on August 19 and two maintenance releases, 0.15.1 on August 26 and 0.15.2 on August 27. In total, 23 pull requests were merged in August.

Network Updates

Mainnet highlights

The number of daily transactions on Sapphire Mainnet was in the 7k-14k range. The monthly average in August was 19,480 transactions and was lower compared to the previous month (27,317 transactions). A daily maximum was 288,402 transactions on 1 August (compared to 102,385 the previous month on 31 July).

While August's daily transaction count on Sapphire Mainnet typically hovered between 7k and 14k, the month showcased an exceptional peak of 288,402 transactions on August 1st, significantly surpassing July's highest daily activity. Although the monthly average of 19,480 transactions saw a slight dip from July (27,317), this standout daily performance highlights the network's capacity for substantial growth.

As of August 31, the Mainnet nodes were well decentralized (July figures in parenthesis):

• 110 (112) validator nodes
• 6 (6) key manager nodes
• 37 (39) Cipher compute nodes
• 47 (48) Emerald compute nodes
• 30 (32) Sapphire compute nodes

No major outages were reported for Oasis foundation-provided services in August. You can keep track of the Oasis Mainnet services on the Mainnet status page.

Testnet highlights

On August 9, the non-breaking Oasis Core 25.5 upgrade was proposed on Testnet. Read the “Core platform updates” section below to see more about the Oasis Core features.

The number of daily transactions on Sapphire Testnet saw a dynamic range of 9k-17k. While August's monthly average reached 10,475 daily transactions, a 10% decrease from July's 11,624, the network peaked on August 10th with an impressive 17,837 transactions, showcasing robust developer activity (24,008 on July 6th).

As of July 31, the Testnet nodes were well decentralized (June figures in parenthesis):

• 44 (45) validator nodes
• 8 (6) key manager nodes
• 19 (19) Cipher compute nodes
• 24 (25) Emerald compute nodes
• 19 (19) Sapphire compute nodes
• 3 (4) Pontus-X compute node

No major outages were reported for Oasis foundation-provided services in August. You can check out the details on the Testnet status page.

Nexus & Explorer

The Nexus team focused on improving system robustness, fault tolerance, validator insights, deployment efficiency, and CI/CD processes, alongside dependency and configuration adjustments. The GRPC connections are now lazy (#1132). This prevents Nexus from failing to start if a configured runtime node is unavailable. Recent validator nodes uptimes (currently the last 24 hours) are now stored in the validator metadata table and are accessible through the client API (#800). 

Database migrations are now part of the Nexus binary instead of separate files (#1130). This greatly simplifies the distribution of the software. Staking history analyzer now ensures that it can start even if the starting height is missing from the source node, provided the epoch is already indexed in the database (#1137). 

The team made two releases: 0.7.12, released on August 8, and 0.7.13, released on August 15. In total, 31 pull requests were merged in August.

The Explorer team migrated the Material UI to an in-house Oasis UI library this month, along with other fixes. The Oasis UI library is a common design language used in Oasis products, ranging from our Website, the Documentation, Oasis Explorer, ROSE wallet (web, extension, mobile), ROFL App, and Oasis-branded products such as BlockVote. 

The migration of the Explorer included building blocks such as badges, select and list components, dividers, alerts, icon buttons, image list and a dozen of others (#2121, #2144, #2110, #2128, #2118, #2106, #2114, #1993, #2109, #2131, #2112, #2125, #2111, #2115, #2119, #2113, #2116). Highlighting of related elements such as addresses was greatly optimized and simplified (#2124, #2160, #2108). 

On the consensus end, the validator uptime is now shown (#2123). The Testnet faucet for the Pontus X blockchain page was revisited (#2102). The token type now also includes a checkmark in the list of types to improve accessibility (#2008). Under the hood, the Orval library—a RESTFUL client generator—was upgraded (#2104).
In total, 34 pull requests were merged in August, and a new 1.24.1 releasewas  made on August 26 and is already available at explorer.oasis.io!

Developer Platform & Paratime Updates

The Oasis SDK team focused on ROFL and ParaTime network robustness this month. The most important addition is the ROFL proxy (#2284, #2302, #2304). This feature enables ROFL-powered apps to seamlessly expose their ports publicly and make them accessible on a subdomain derived from the provider, the machine ID, and the port number. LUKS—the encrypted file system used by ROFL—was bumped to version 2 (#2297, #2299).

The following ROFL-related releases were made:

• ROFL containers 0.7.0 released on August 11, 0.7.1 released on August 19, 0.7.2 released on August 21, and 0.7.3 released on August 26.
• ROFL dev image 0.2.0 on August 20.
• ROFL scheduler 0.4.0 released on August 11.

The TypeScript client saw a new 1.3.0 release bringing support for ROFL transactions and ROFL Marketplace (#2290).

Finally, transaction nonces for any ParaTime transaction can now originate from the near future (#2291), with the maximum future offset configurable for each ParaTime (#2294). Previously, any transaction with a future nonce was rejected.

On the Sapphire front, a new Subcall.getRoflAppId() helper was introduced in Solidity, which returns the ROFL App ID that corresponds to the key the transaction was signed with (#606). If the transaction didn’t originate from a ROFL-deployed app, it returns zero. This enables developers to deploy a single smart contract that can authenticate against multiple ROFL-deployed apps, for example, storing user funds and associating them with a specific app.

Last but not least, on August 14, after 3.5 years of development and 10,152,146 validated blocks on Mainnet, the Sapphire team is proud to announce the 1.0 release of the Sapphire ParaTime. This marks a significant milestone, providing developers with a stable, confidential EVM-compatible blockchain for building secure dApps.

In parallel with Sapphire, the Cipher Paratime team also released a new 3.4.0 release on August 14, integrating the latest ROFL proxy component.

The Oasis Boot—a minimal Linux distribution to be used when provisioning Intel TDX virtual machines—now uses Linux kernel 6.12.41 (#24) and has nftables enabled to support ROFL proxy (#23). Three releases of Oasis Boot were made this month: 0.6.0 on August 1, 0.6.1 on August 5, and 0.6.2 on August 19. Developers can upgrade their existing apps to the latest version by issuing the “oasis rofl upgrade” command.

The Oasis Web3 Gateway team merged 11 PRs this month and made a new 5.3.2 maintenance release on August 27.

Documentation updates:

• A major redesign of the diagrams was made (#2288, #608, #609, #1378, #1372). These are now more consistent with the new Oasis UI design language.
• A new font for chapter headings was introduced (#1407)
• Admonitions were redesigned, and a new Example admonition was introduced that will be used in the future to collect all examples used in the docs in one place (#1379)
• A new ROFL proxy chapter was added, which describes how to expose ports of your ROFL-powered app publicly (#1413)
• The Sapphire vs Ethereum chapter was updated to include the whitelisted slots that are accessible through the eth_getStorageAt (#588)
• New node operators will be happy to know that the Quick State Sync is now fully operational and documented (#1363)
• After the July incident of the Router protocol service, the bridge is no longer operational on Oasis Sapphire and was removed from the known Sapphire contract addresses chapter (#611) 
• The Sourcify service revamped its web user interface for verifying the contracts. Our Contract verification chapter was refreshed accordingly (#1380)

The Playground team added a healthcheck service that crawls over the links and checks if they are still operating (#138). This will help the projects listed on playground.oasis.io be fresh and up-to-date.

Core Platform Updates

The Oasis Core team implemented a few important features related to the CometBFT consensus protocol and more efficient checkpoint synchronization, namely:

• Stateless clients can now fetch data from multiple providers, automatically falling back to the next one if the current provider fails (#6282). Also, the consensus code was refactored and made more consistent on number of places (#6303).
• Stateless clients now use a persistent store for storing light blocks (#6285).
• A separate P2P protocol for checkpoint sync is now supported (#6277). Syncing from a checkpoint generates a different type of traffic and load compared to the block sync.
• The key manager has been cleaned up and no longer stores the key manager policy locally, as doing so provided no security or performance benefits (#6298). This reduces the total lines of code to maintain in such a security-critical component.

In addition, a number of tests were made running in parallel on the CI, and flakiness was removed in CHURP tests, resulting in 13 pull requests merged in August. The team also made a new 25.5 release on August 8. Consult the change log to learn about the new features.

Last, a new ADR-25 was proposed that describes the upgrade procedure of ParaTime bundles while the Oasis node is running (#32). This includes upgrading both L1 ParaTimes, such as Sapphire and Cipher, or L2 ROFLs. The ADR uses the ParaTime Bundle Registry as the preferred reference implementation for hosting bundles.

That covers it for July. There are big things in the works for Q4, so be sure to revisit the Oasis blog for more updates. Meanwhile, chat more with the Oasis team by joining the Oasis Discord or following us on X.