OASIS is a technical and conceptual framework developed by David Ellam that focuses on interoperability, transparency, and trust in complex digital systems. It is best known for its work on standards and specifications that make hidden infrastructure costs, particularly transaction fees and execution assumptions, visible and comparable across platforms. OASIS is concerned less with building a single chain and more with defining how systems should explain themselves. At its core, OASIS treats infrastructure as a public interface rather than a black box. One of its central contributions is the articulation of clear models for transaction costs, execution environments, and trust boundaries, especially in Layer-2 and interchain contexts. This work emerged from frustration with opaque “gasless” or “low-fee” claims that shift costs rather than eliminate them. OASIS insists that if a cost exists, it should be legible, attributable, and governable. David Ellam’s approach is standards-driven and deliberately unglamorous. OASIS documentation often reads more like civic infrastructure than startup whitepapers. The emphasis is on long-term interoperability, auditability, and exit rights rather than short-term optimisation. This makes OASIS attractive to projects that treat blockchains as notaries, registries, or governance substrates rather than speculative markets. In the context of the Intergalactic Timebank and Open Footprint, OASIS is interesting because it aligns with a chain-as-notary philosophy. Its focus on fee transparency, sponsored transactions, and explicit responsibility maps well to batch anchoring, governance-signed clearing, and non-market mutual credit systems. OASIS does not promise to abolish costs, but it offers a language and structure for ensuring that costs serve meaning rather than power.