During the last two weeks, Enigma illustrated the high level of social activity. The first developer bounty program is expected to focus on creating certain building blocks for secret contract development. Funding for each bounty varies based on complexity. Enigma will be managing these bounties with Gitcoin. Moreover, Enigma announced the Testnet Developer Release of its Discovery network. Now Enigma’s partners and collaborators can easily begin building secret contracts that will power their own applications and solutions. This developer testnet finally enables privacy for general computations, enabling dApp developers to create significantly meaningful and secure applications. More to follow!
Development
This initial effort focuses on creating certain building blocks for secret contract development. This should result in several open-sourced repos that feature sample secret contracts (written in Rust!) and a simple client-side UI (using Enigma-JS).
Bounty Guidelines
Bounty submissions should contain well-documented code that can be followed along easily by another developer.
These bounties will become part of Enigma’s educational resources moving forward, and they’ll be available to future developers as examples, inspiration, and starting points.
Complete the application process before starting work — the Enigma team will be reviewing pre-submission materials and initially selecting just one applicant at a time for each bounty.
Current Bounties
INow Enigma is working on these particular applications:
- Secret Access-Control
- Secret Benchmarking
- Non-Fungible Token Lottery
- Secret Data Validation
- Rock-Paper-Scissors
Check out the issues, and if one of these is interesting to you, follow the instructions to complete a pre-submission application, and you will hear from Enigma as soon as possible.
Funding for each bounty varies based on complexity — from $400-$600 in this round. Enigma will be managing these bounties with Gitcoin. The first bounty (secret access-control) has already been posted to Gitcoin here.
The Testnet Developer Release of Enigma’s Discovery network is announced. This considerable milestone clears the way for its partners and collaborators to quickly begin building secret contracts that will power their applications and solutions. Contracts built now will be able to be immediately deployed once Enigma is live on Ethereum mainnet — helping to provide immediate usage for the Enigma network.
This developer testnet finally enables privacy for general computations, enabling dApp developers to create significantly meaningful and secure applications
Here are the key new features of Enigma being included in this release of Discovery:
Stateful (Encrypted) Secret Contracts
Secret contracts are capable of maintaining a state, allowing to persist of encrypted data between private computations or different tasks. Stateful contracts enable many more use cases than stateless computations.
Secret Contracts decoupled from Smart Contracts
The Enigma network only relies on Ethereum as the consensus layer but is otherwise decoupled from the requirements and limitations of Ethereum. That means that secret contracts can have their runtime and programming language (Rust, instead of Solidity).
Private Outputs
In addition to private inputs, the network supports storage of computation outputs by storing the contract state encrypted on-chain and sending results encrypted directly to the dApp user.
Ethereum integration
Secret Contracts may call arbitrary functions of any other smart contract deployed on Ethereum.
Peer-to-peer and storage layers
Completely redesigned from scratch, these functions are now an integral part of the Enigma network and no longer rely on Ethereum.
New Guides, Walkthroughs, and Documentation!
To support the growth of Enigma’s network and ecosystem, its team is emphasizing usability and reliable documentation for developers. Alongside the release of the developer testnet, new content to the Protocol page on the Enigma blog, as well as brand-new documentation for Discovery were published.
Discovery Documentation
Visit https://enigma.co/discovery-documentation/ to see the full documentation for Discovery and get started!
What’s Next?
For developers
With this testnet developer release comes new opportunities for developers in the Enigma ecosystem. Going forward, Enigma will be much more active in hackathons (both in-person and online) as well as developer grant programs. The first upcoming initiative will be the introduction of Gitcoin bounties to create sample libraries (such as secret voting, secret auctions, secret data comparison, etc.) that other developers can use as building blocks. Enigma will also be developing a more involved accelerator program for longer-term projects.
For node runners
Now that secret contract developers have what they need to be successful, the attention now entirely turns to deploying the networked Discovery testnet on Ethereum, and with that launch, the beginning of the Genesis Game. If you are unfamiliar, this is the process by which genesis nodes (the first nodes supporting the Enigma network) will be selected.
The next communications around the Genesis Game will cover token economics, timelines for token snapshots and testnet token distributions, and other critical details for those interested in operating genesis nodes.
For the community
Enigma is looking forward to a number of exciting developer-focused conferences coming up in the very near future. Soon some of the upcoming events will be announcing where Enigma team will be speaking and leading workshops.
Social encounters
Enigma’s mission is to ensure the adoption and usage of decentralized technologies. It is trying to achieve this mission by bringing privacy and the ability to use sensitive data to blockchains. Enigma is a secure computation protocol which is able to run blockchain functions, or smart contracts, on delicate (secret) data.
Blockchain is a fantastic technology for correctness — however, it comes at the enormous cost of privacy. Data on blockchains are public by default. This not only limits any application with sensitive data to run in a decentralized manner, but it also limits usability.
An Overview of Set Protocol
Set Protocol is among the projects that are driving meaningful adoption of decentralized technologies. With Set Protocol, a user (investor) may mint (buy) a Set that contains assets such as DAI or ETH that periodically re-balances itself based on some rules. Similar to buying into a mutual fund, a user can buy into a Set, which is an investment vehicle with automated trading strategies. Current Sets trade on volatility, price trends, and achieving a specific portfolio composition.
Currently, the Set Protocol works in the following way:
- Fund manager defines a SET: A SET is an ERC20 token and the mould for the investment vehicle. The SET contains logic about the investment strategy, which is the composition of the portfolio (75% ETH, 25% WBTC) and conditions that are required to rebalance the portfolio. Currently rebalancing requirements for a SET is on-chain and publicly visible.
- Investors put assets in a given SET. User can either placed in the basket of goods or put in a single asset, which is then traded into SET assets. At this point, new Sets are minted.
- When rebalancing conditions are met, which are currently time since last, rebalance and price difference, a rebalance is proposed and initiated by a network participant.
- When rebalancing is called, the contract checks whether the re-balancing logic is correct and if so, the rebalancing is executed via a dutch auction. Currently Set Labs is responsible for providing liquidity. In the future, any network participant can program bots that connect to decentralized exchanges like Kyber and 0x to initiate orders required for the reshuffling.
This protocol doesn’t offer the same experience to participants (fund managers) that build and open-source Sets. While economic incentives such as management fees and performance bonuses can be integrated into the Set contract logic, the public nature of the blockchain reveals the “secret sauce” of each Set and enables any participant to deploy a similar Set with lower fees. As a result, the incentive for fund managers to provide competitive Sets is lacking. Without some way to protect strategies, fund managers don’t receive the same level of benefits that individual users receive. In other words, Sets are really cool if you are minting them — not so much if you are building them.
Secrecy for Sets
Using Enigma, fund managers can build and deploy “Secret Sets” — or in other words, private investment strategies. Secret Sets will not only incentivize fund managers to participate but will also create a provable performance and trading history that would protect investors against rogue fund managers.
The workflow for a Secret Set would be as follows:
- A fund manager creates a trading strategy described with Enigma secret contracts (written in Rust). Since Enigma secret contracts compile into WASM instead of EVM, it’s possible to enable more complex strategies that work with decimal points. Fund managers can also use Catalyst for backtesting (research) and master data-driven algorithmic trading strategies that can be turned into a Secret Set.
- The two inputs of the secret contract would be the (private) trading strategy and the price feed. While trading strategies remain encrypted, any network participant can run historical data on the approach to ensure plans haven’t been modified. (Note: Enigma’s network cannot currently leverage on-chain price oracles like MKR, so a price feed would need to be built-in.)
- Deployment of the Secret Set would deploy an ERC-20 token contract on Ethereum. This contract would act similar to the current Set contract, except the rebalancing conditions (trading logic) would not be visible to the entire network. The contract creator would also want to make certain adjustments to the contract that mitigate malicious activity by the fund manager, such as adding limits to how much of the portfolio value can be traded in a day. Measures like this would prevent adversarial actions such as dumping or pumping for personal gains.
- Investors put assets in a given SET. User can either placed in the basket of goods or put in a single asset, which is then traded into SET assets. At this point, new Sets are minted by the ERC-20 token contact.
- When rebalancing conditions are satisfied based on the computations on the Enigma network, the Secret Set will call a function on Ethereum to rebalance asset balances in the ERC-20 token contract.
- Rebalancing can then be done by a dutch auction similar to the current rebalancing process.
DECENTRALIZE THIS!
Enigma’s new episode of Decentralize This! features @owocki of @gitcoin. Kevin talks with @TorBair about the future of Gitcoin, what sustainability means for open source and blockchain, and designing for humans instead of abstracting them away.
See also:
Finance
Roadmap
What’s next?
- ‘Genesis game’
Rumours
No updates
Social media metrics
Enigma community continues to grow; there is a constant increase in the number of subscribers of Enigma social media channels. However, the number of Telegram and Twitter followers slightly decreased these weeks.
Telegram — Telegram HQ for the Enigma Project.
Secret Nodes Community Telegram — a community-led group of individuals who care about privacy, data ownership, and are dedicated to supporting secret node runners.
Twitter — The official announcements channel. An average number of retweets is 40 for one post. Publications with 30–100 likes.
Reddit — Threads with 6–20 comments, 10–30 upvotes.
See also:
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Enigma Facebook likes, Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com
