Hello and welcome to Enigma’s world! We’re really excited to update you on their major developments, recent and upcoming events!
Many of you know that Enigma turns ordinary smart contracts into “secret contracts”, allowing developers to build thousands of new and valuable privacy-preserving solutions. Secret contracts unlock the enormous potential of dApps and can revolutionize a great variety of industries.
The most important milestone for Enigma in 2019 was launching their networked testnet in December. 2020 promises to be a more interesting year for Enigma!
The Enigma’s core team and community are excited to launch the first version of SecretDAO using the Alchemy platform. They hope that SecretDAO allows the community to get further involved with projects and applications built with the Enigma protocol, as well as research that benefits the Enigma ecosystem and beyond. All are welcome to apply, and the DAO will vote on your membership. The ultimate goal is to allocate funds toward specific projects and relevant bounties. SecretDAO might decide how node rewards feed back into valuable pieces of the Enigma ecosystem.
The team has recently announced their Salad 2020 update! Salad was released in August 2019 and is a flagship non-custodial mixing service which is already in testing. It features single-interaction mixes with a low cost. Read on to find out more info about the core technical updates.
Enigma live-streamed their 2nd open community call! For those who couldn’t join it and ask questions to the core members the team made a brief summary of each part of the discussion! Moreover, you have a great opportunity to watch the full video! The team thanks everyone who joined and participated on the call!
More great news! Enigma is thrilled to be heading back to ETHDenver as Meta-level sponsors in February! Read on to learn more about the event.
Enigma is proud to continue building new types of solutions and driving them towards widespread adoption. They look forward to sharing more updates and information with the community very soon.
Stay tuned for additional updates on Genesis Game and mainnet!
Development
Github metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
The latest announcement of the Launch of SecretDAO!
In collaboration with DAOstack, the Enigma core team and community are excited to launch the first version of SecretDAO using the Alchemy platform. The team hope that SecretDAO allows the Enigma community to get further involved with projects and applications built with the Enigma protocol, as well as research that benefits the Enigma ecosystem and beyond. The Enigma Collective will play an important role for SecretDAO going forward. This group represents the core group of community leaders, who may get unique opportunities to earn reputation and other forms of incentives. They also collaborate on a number of different projects within the Enigma ecosystem, including application development, research, privacy education, design, and more.
Overall, this DAO represents their intentions to realize a more decentralized future of Enigma.
DAOs are autonomous. The definitive characteristic of a DAO is that rules are programmed, meaning they can be applied or enforced automatically when specific events happen.
Who is allowed to join?
All are welcome to apply, and the DAO will vote on your membership! Submit a proposal using the Alchemy platform.
How will members participate?
Ultimately, the goal is to allocate funds toward specific projects and relevant bounties. SecretDAO might decide how node rewards feed back into valuable pieces of the Enigma ecosystem.
As a first step, the team are conducting an experiment at ETHDenver. Potential members will request reputation, then our DAO is responsible for voting on hackathon submissions to determine winners of Enigma’s three bounties (details TBA).
Follow these 3 steps:
- Ask for reputation (example of a reputation proposal from GenesisDAO)
- Reputation gets approved by the DAO
- Take action: Vote on existing proposals and create new proposals with templates like this one from PolkaDAO
Submitting Proposals
Enigma has offered a series of grants in the past. Their plan is to experiment with allocating resources through collective decision-making processes. Initially, they are only accepting proposals for membership and ETHDenver hackathon submissions. However, one possible goal is to distribute staking rewards via DAO.
The Enigma core team will operate nodes identical to those of other ecosystem participants throughout testnet and mainnet. Portions of these rewards and fees earned by these nodes may be distributed according to votes by SecretDAO members.
Other related links:
Resources from DAOstack:
“How to Participate in Blockchain Governance in Good Faith (and with Good Manners)” — Vlad Zamfir
Salad: 2020 Development Update
Enigma enables data privacy for Ethereum contracts. This means the inputs and outputs to contracts can be kept secret from the network throughout a computation. However, Enigma can also be used to enable transactional privacy: the ability to hide the transaction history of addresses. Enigma is expanding upon and improving their transactional privacy solutions for Ethereum.
Salad is a flagship non-custodial mixing service which is already in testing. Unlike Zero Knowledge Proof-based mixers that require two user interactions, Salad features single-interaction mixes with a low cost. Salad was released in August 2019. Since that time the team have been working hard and are now ready to announce a few important updates.
Technical Updates
Wallet Integrations
Enigma developers believe that enabling users to mix from within wallets and applications will be crucial for encouraging participation and improving the anonymity set, and will set the stage for future usability improvements (see Salad V1).
The team have almost finished with a native integration for My Ether Wallet. This means MEW users will be able to access a Salad UI from within their wallet, without needing to visit an external site.
Internal testing
The engineering team is working towards greater and greater uptime on their testnet with Salad running and executing transactions. They’re getting into edge cases and resolving issues across all Salad components.
Future Features
Advanced mixes
The team are hoping to improve the effectiveness of a mix with Salad by modifying the mix algorithm. There are a few ways to do this, such as delaying a deposit’s participation in a deal for a variable amount of time, or having the same deposit participate in multiple, consequent mixes. This is still in the research stage.
Variable Size Mix
Right now, all ethereum-based mixers require users to deposit a fixed amount. This means users often have to mix more or less than they like, and can also mean liquidity is split across different mixing contracts that have different deposit sizes. It can also result in a large number of recipient addresses. For example, if I can only mix 0.1 ETH at a time and I want to mix 0.8 ETH, I will end up with 8 new addresses to manage. This is a big usability problem for making payments later. They’re currently exploring different approaches for enabling variable size mixes.
Liquidity
They’re looking into what methods will be most effective for bootstrapping anonymity without predictable behavior that can be easily analyzed and make mixes less anonymous. They’re also looking into methods for alerting users if a mix had a low participation rate, and suggesting that they mix again.
Token mixing
Currently, Salad and other mixers only support mixing Ethereum. However, based on customer input, the team are formulating an approach for supporting token mixes as well.
UX and Wallets
The team are working with wallets to find and implement solutions to common UX problems. Essentially, this boils down to one simple problem: almost every time you mix, you end up with more addresses than you started out with.
Address Generation
Right now, it’s not that big of a problem to create a new address every time you want to mix 1 ETH or 0.1 ETH. But, if we want to mix 0.5 ETH, now we have to create 5 addresses and participate in 5 transactions. If a mixing service is able to implement variable size mixes, like Wasabi, the user may need to generate many addresses, not all of which will be used. It will be important for wallets to manage the creation of new addresses controlled by the user without requiring manual actions by the user.
Non-custodial mixing services solve real problems for users and will remain in high demand, especially as the DeFi space continues to grow. The team are looking forward to improving Salad, building solutions, and getting even more community feedback as they drive adoption for the public blockchain ecosystem!
Participate in Enigma’s survey, and check out the issue they’ve opened with Metamask Snaps.
Social encounters
Enigma live-streamed their 2nd open community call!
Enigma featured the members of the core team and some participants from the Enigma Collective, representing their global community. The team discussed a number of important updates and took questions from participants.
A brief summary of each part of the discussion:
- The team just released a testnet in December, and made significant progress toward network stabilization.
- They gave updates on Salad integrations with MetaMask and MyEtherWallet, including screenshots of the UI.
- Enigma is going to have a strong presence at the ETHDenver hackathon, including a technical presentation.
- In collaboration with DAOstack, they are planning to launch a “decentralized autonomous organization” called SecretDAO!
- Recently, the team introduced an opportunity for members of the Collective to manage their own section of Enigma’s official blog.
Following deployment of the new testnet, Enigma is planning to give an update on next steps for node runners and tENG distribution.
Here is a detailed recap of the initial version of Discovery testnet:
Salad Updates
Take your time to watch the full video of the community call
Upcoming events
Enigma is thrilled to be heading back to ETHDenver in February!
The team are returning this year as Meta-level sponsors. With the recent launch of the networked testnet (the final major technical milestone before mainnet launches in 2020) they are actively looking to get as many developers as possible hands-on with their protocol and building their own “secret”, privacy-preserving smart contracts.
Six members of the full-time Enigma team are attending ETHDenver.
They’ll be doing an official workshop on Friday, February 14th. If you miss it, you can meet Fred and Victor from the engineering team to get a hands-on introduction to secret contracts. They will also have on-line support from Taariq and Laura, so keep an eye out for them in the Enigma Discord!
Before ETHDenver starts, the team will be active on the ETHDenver Discord as well as Enigma’s own channels.
What can you build at ETHDenver?
- Integrate transactional privacy to your favorite wallet or dApp. Here’s the repo for Salad, a coin-mixer that uses Enigma.
- Private voting that uses Enigma instead of a commit-reveal process (sample voting secret contract code here)
- Secret hedge funds leveraging Set Protocol
- Recreate Python-pandas-style data data manipulation functions in Rust for use with Enigma: create a shared, encrypted database that two parties can update and query without seeing each other’s private data.
- Private auctions or dark pools. You can adjust the Millionaire’s Problem code to create a secret auction.
- Games that require you to hide actions on Ethereum, such as games that are multiplayer and use private state like Rock, Paper, Scissors, Battleships, or Poker
- Games that use randomness like dice games or lotteries. See the coin flip sample contract.
- Quiz or word competitions like Jeopardy or Hangman. You could build off this secret data validation example for a game like this.
- A scavenger hunt with secret locations potentially leveraging FOAM. You could build on the Secret Data Validation example for something like this.
- Access Control for secret messaging, or for a dead-man’s switch. See a sample application demonstrating application control here.
- Access Control for digital content management.
- Enable social recovery for a wallet while keeping the designated friends secret.
- Enable a signing key to be kept within the enclave and deployed whenever certain conditions are met.
- Secret inputs to a credit-scoring algorithm.
- Sybil-prevention via social verification — without exposing your user’s data! This would be similar to the secret data validation example.
ETHDenver applications are open! Apply now.
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions (information from Etherscan.io)
Roadmap
Defiant — 2020
Defiant brings complete chain-independence. This is just another critical step towards their mission — growing and improving Enigma, scaling the developer community, achieving global adoption, and solving some of the world’s biggest challenges to privacy and true decentralization.
Enigma’s roadmap does not really end in 2020. Enigma is building a foundation for decades of progress. Enigma is the critical missing technology that can allow for truly decentralized applications and useful solutions.
Partnerships and team members
Announcing the Launch of the Enigma Collective Blog!
The team introduce a new process for collaboratively researching and writing content for the Enigma’s blog.
They want the community to participate more directly in their project as the team work towards the Genesis Game and their mainnet launch. This will give the opportunity to share interesting research, perspectives, and experiences on Enigma’s blog, as well as through other official Enigma channels.
Anyone can become a member of the Collective and publish their own research and writing on the Enigma Collective Blog! Members can gain support and resources for their individual project(s) and research, connect with like-minded privacy and blockchain experts around the world, and learn from each other by participating in various Working Groups.
Read the whole article to see some potential topics and how you can get involved.
Ready to apply for membership? Use this link.
James Waugh has recently become a new member of the core team, and one of his main priorities will be supporting the Enigma Collective. They are coordinating various opportunities for members to get involved. If you feel you have some brilliant ideas for a project let the team know, you’re welcome to apply for leadership roles in Enigma community.
Check out this page on enigma.co to learn more about the experienced team of technologists, researchers and business people.
Rumors
Questions from Enigma’s 2nd community open call (Jan 2020) :
Are you in contact with any companies or developers at companies who are interested in building on the Enigma testnet?
Enigma team: There are many interesting use cases and collaboration ideas! Within the public blockchain ecosystem, there are certain access control use cases that we have seen. 2key is a company with whom we are scoping out digital rights management. Also, we have been exploring possible Salad integrations with DeFi applications. Recently, our team had productive conversations with Bloom and ConsenSys Health. More info will be available in due time.
How did you make the determination to work with Ethereum? Are you planning for Enigma to work with other smart contract platforms?
Enigma team: Deciding to focus on Ethereum was an obvious choice because most of the development ecosystem in public blockchains revolves around Ethereum. As for other platforms, we have started exploring interoperability projects like Cosmos and Polkadot.
Social media metrics
Social media dynamics:
The charts above show the decline in the number of Telegram followers.
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Enigma Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com
There are so many ways to get involved with Enigma’s ecosystem! You can:
- Read more on the blog
- Develop applications with Enigma
- Become an ecosystem partner
- Join the community and attend live events
- Apply to join the Enigma Collective
- Participate on the Forum or Discord
See also:
Secret Nodes Community Telegram — a community-led group of individuals who care about privacy, data ownership, and are dedicated to supporting secret node runners.
This is not financial advice.
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