Office Hours: The Oasis Gateway
By: Andrew Miller
Tags: Dapps, Development, Blockchain, Privacy, Cloud Computing

Office Hours: The Oasis Gateway

Improving the usability of DApps with a simple API.

This month we hosted an office hours featuring the new Oasis Gateway. Oasis engineer Stan Augé-Pujadas and Product Marketing Manager, Andrew Miller, discussed our motivation behind building the Oasis Gateway, and how it can help developers increase adoption of their DApps by allowing them to pay transaction fees on behalf of their users. They also demoed the Secret Ballot App, and showed developers how easy it is to integrate with the Oasis Gateway.

If you missed this month’s office hours, don’t worry — you can watch the full office hours here, or check out some highlights below.

Important Resources

Q. Where can I learn more about the Oasis Gateway?

We’ve got a few different resources for you:

To review the Oasis Gateway code and provide feedback checkout our GitHub repo

If you’d like to try using the Oasis Gateway you can do so by following the Secret Ballot tutorial

If you run into issues or have questions, join our community Slack channel

Motivation behind the Oasis Gateway

Q: Why did we build the Oasis Gateway?

We were looking at the current state DApps and felt like adoption was really being hindered by the tremendous amount of friction involved with setting up and using a Wallet.

Right now to use a decentralized app you have to do the following:

Open the DApp you want to use

Be asked to install MetaMask

Go to coinbase.com and create an account.

Verify email account.

Do KYC. Take photo of passport/drivers license and send that to Coinbase.

Wait for that to be verified

Link bank account to Coinbase account.

Transfer USD to Coinbase account.

Make trade to purchase token.

Transfer token to MetaMask wallet.

At this point you can use the decentralized application.

Anytime you use the application, you have to approve the transaction.

While valuable, this flow is incredibly difficult for someone to follow if they’re not tech savvy, or familiar with blockchain. With the Oasis Gateway, we wanted to provide developers with an option to appeal to a broader audience of users — specifically those who might find this flow too cumbersome.

Q: Got it, so what is the Oasis Gateway, and how does it solve this problem?

The Oasis Gateway is an interface that we provide in front of the Oasis Network. It’s designed to provide a cloud like experience on top of the network to simplify development of DApps.

It specifically improves usability for DApps, by allowing developers to pay transaction fees on behalf of their end users. Rather than having their user’s add a wallet, a developer can pay transaction fees using their own wallet to make DApp setup and usage much more streamlined.

Q: How does the Oasis Gateway fit with our other tooling?

The Oasis Client is integrated with your front-end app, and talks directly to the Oasis Gateway. Right now the Oasis Client is implemented in Javascript and Typescript and it’s open sourced.

Your front-end app (on the left), would use the Oasis Client to talk to the Oasis Gateway, which exposes a simple interface for a service hosted on the Oasis Network. Services can be developed using the Oasis SDK. More on that in our previous post.

Overview of how DApps can interact with the Oasis Network.

Q: So there is some trade off here between ease of use and control. The user is giving up some control, but in exchange gets some properties of blockchain, correct?

Yes, the user still gets integrity provided by the system. Their transactions can’t be modified by the developer or the developer gateway. They also get some guarantees that their transactions remain confidential and lastly, because this is all built on a blockchain, users can access an immutable log of all transactions made.

So in some sense, this is an intermediate step between a traditional app backed by a cloud and DApp powered by a blockchain. They don’t get all the guarantees that a wallet would provide, but it’s better than a traditional system.

Q: So who is this technology really for?

We think this great for developers who have a user base that mostly used to web based apps, and not familiar with blockchain.

In an ideal world, folks would feel comfortable having a wallet and using it, but until then we hope that the Oasis Gateway can help ease the transition from web based apps to blockchain based apps.

Q: Okay, so how do I actually use the Oasis Gateway?

Watch this video above to find out!