On July 21, 2022, the Oasis Foundation, Sapphire, the first confidential Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible ParaTime, went live on Testnet. The launch followed the successful deployment of their original EVM ParaTime — Emerald.
Sapphire is the first confidential EVM computing environment in the cryptocurrency industry that allows developers to take advantage of the unique privacy-preserving technology to create privacy-enabled dApps on blockchain.
The Oasis Foundation recognized privacy as the essential pillar in Web3, stating the lack of options for EVM developers to build privacy-enabled apps was the main reason Sapphire was created.
According to the video released by the foundation via their official Twitter platform on September 30, the Oasis Foundation stated that the contract state is private on Sapphire and only visible to the contract.
Unlike in Ethereum, where everything such as transaction state, transaction input, and output, the state transition is visible to the public, on Sapphire, all of these are hidden by default and are only visible to the public if it is desired to make them visible to individuals outside the contract.
Basically, security is private on Sapphire, meaning smart contract calls and transactions are encrypted and only visible to the sender and contract.
However, to recover the functionalities of Ethereum, i.e., expose contract state to authorized third parties, users can do this through explicit getters – whereby users will provide get methods on the contract. Sapphire is said to generate them automatically if the variables are marked as public.
On Sapphire, Logs are plain text by default and these texts can be encrypted by using the precompile codes that it offers.
Also, it provides other interesting pre-compiled codes such as cryptographically secured precompiles and number generators that gives users the ability to play games.
On-chain games are not found on Ethereum and other networks whose games are off-chain. Sapphire, however, allows projects using it to play games within the network, increasing trust and decentralization of the game as it is on-chain.
Furthermore, Sapphire enables cryptographic random number generation (RNG) on contract and the creation of private decentralized exchange (DEX), among others.
