Secret Smart Contracts with Enigma
These “launch partners,” said Enigma co-founder and CEO Guy Zyskind, are already building on the current version of the technology, called “Discovery,” within the testnet, so when the protocol actually goes live, they’ll be processing user’s data without revealing it to any outside party.
We’re very proud to publicly announce our partnership with Enigma. As published on CoinDesk, we’re excited to collaborate with Enigma on secret validation, a building-block we think can be useful to many future applications. Secret validation enables a user to purchase data with confidence, using “data validators” to check the accuracy of the underlying data without exposing it on-chain. With data integrity guarantees, consumers no longer need to rely on the incumbent, trusted data providers, opening up the data validation market to a wider range of data providers.
Privacy
Blockchain technology allows us to enable a trustless data marketplace that overcomes current market failures. However, as a result of blockchains’ inherent transparency, it presents us with a new, key challenge — keeping the raw data private. A naive implementation of a decentralized marketplace would expose the sold data to 3rd parties. This would invoke a number of issues with an accumulated crushing effect. For example, when specific data has been sold and validated once, 3rd parties would be able to view it on-chain, for free, and no one would ever need to pay for the same data again. Providers would not agree to participate in such an ecosystem.
In order to overcome this, and numerous other problems, ReBloc leverages a proprietary privacy protocol for blockchain solution co-developed with Enigma for this specific use case. Enigma’s “secret contracts” are smart contracts that hide contract inputs and outputs, allowing ReBloc to execute validations and transactions without exposing the raw data on-chain. Enigma is a blockchain-based protocol that uses groundbreaking privacy technologies to enable scalable, end-to-end decentralized applications. With Enigma, “smart contracts” become “secret contracts,” in which input data is kept hidden from nodes in the Enigma network that execute code. This functionality is essential for protecting sensitive data, as privacy is a fundamental necessity to the ReBloc network. With Enigma, the sensitive real-estate data is kept in an encrypted format and never exposed to parties outside of the trusted execution environment (TEE) in which Enigma nodes run computations.
With data staying private, ReBloc successfully avoids data leakage. Enrichers can sell the same data multiple times, as one cannot simply look at past transactions to obtain the data. Furthermore, the fact that key information pertaining to the purchase remains private, purchase behavior is completely obfuscated from competitors and other potentially nefarious actors.
Computational Environment
While we only discussed leveraging the Enigma protocol and enclaved environment to perform simple computations such as validation — be it an exact match, or confidence bands — the Enigma environment supports much more complex use cases that could benefit the ReBloc ecosystem. For instance, suppose that a certain Consumer is looking to source data for the purpose of using such data as inputs for a valuation model, say an AVM. Such Consumer doesn’t actually need to see the inputs, nor does it necessarily need to perform the computation on their own. Leveraging the more complex capabilities and use cases of the Enigma protocol, we envision the ability for such Consumer to leverage an environment in which the regression model (or any other function or algorithm) can consume market inputs without ever having access to such data. The contract can receive the data inputs required for the regression, run such computations in a secure environment, and return only the output value, say the valuation, to the Consumer. The cost of such inputs could perhaps be lower, and it is clear that further efficiencies could be achieved.
