Launch partners with Enigma: Building Block POC
We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with Enigma to build the ability to Search over Encrypted Metadata.

Since 2013, Datacoup has been working to help consumers control/own their data and monetize it for their own benefit. Enigma first popped up on our radar in late 2015, when a Fast Company article profiled the incubatory stages of their project. Enigma spoke about data ownership and privacy preservation in terms that were close to home. We knew they were fellow travelers on our mission.
A lot has changed since 2015, and the decentralized revolution is on! But the undergirding technology is still nascent and many challenges remain. Enigma is tackling a core issue related to data computation and privacy. Their protocol is a scalable privacy protocol that enables privacy-preserving smart contracts, or — secret contracts.
A requirement for the decentralized data marketplace we’re building at Datacoup is privacy-preservation of both the terms of a smart contract and the underlying data being computed on and transacted.
Given our knowledge and experience with a user-controlled data marketplace (shipped apps, users, data, data-buyers), we’re in a unique position to implement actual, usable code that will live up to the above system requirement.
Search over encrypted metadata
Narrowing or filtering data is a precursor to value or insight derivation from any data-set. However, filtering from a data-set that includes sensitive personal data is not simply a perfunctory requirement, it is the key means of separating potentially de-anonymizing metadata from the relevant data to be computed upon.
In our decentralized data marketplace, early data-purchasers like hedge funds and market researchers intend to analyze aggregate data-sets for insights, but may not want to handle PII for legal, or compliance reasons. The search over metadata building block provides a way for purchasers to isolate relevant data in the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and compute on it for their business purposes.
How does it work?
For example, a hedge fund may want to understand more about the purchase behavior of 25–30 year olds in urban US areas. When a user connects the required data-sets, the data is encrypted on the client. Conducting a search query on encrypted data is all but impossible.
In order to filter down, the larger data pool is pulled into the TEE, where it is decrypted. From here, we can find data profiles that match the parameters of the smart contract (25-30 year olds) and separate relevant data and the addresses associated with it.
The hedge fund can now receive only transaction data pertaining to their metadata requirements, and the nodes doing the computation in the TEE were never privy to potentially sensitive metadata while sorting for relevancy.
Requirements met
Filtering or narrowing data based upon parameters is an essential building block that has implications for nearly anyone trying to derive value or insight from a data-set. In the simple case we provide, sensitive data stays unexposed and desired outcomes are achieved by all interested parties in the transaction.
Here’s the announcement from Enigma’s blog:
Stay-tuned for updates as we put fingers to keyboards for the building block POC!
