Coin Spotlight: Enigma

Building a privacy layer for the decentralized web and enabling scalable, end-to-end decentralized applications.

What is Enigma?

Blockchains, by design, are bad at privacy and as a result, traditional smart contracts suffer from significant limitations. They cannot use or store data that needs to be kept confidential thus restricting the number of use cases for blockchains without any adjustments. In terms of scalability, blockchain computing is currently too slow and expensive making it unfeasible to store or compute large blocks of data.

Enigma is building the first scalable platform for decentralized applications that can utilize sensitive or private data as inputs. Their technology enables computation over encrypted data at scale by combining cutting-edge cryptographic techniques (i.e. Secure Multi-Party Computation) and hardware privacy technologies (i.e. Trusted Execution Environments) with blockchains.

Secret Contracts

Enigma’s protocol allows users to create true private smart contracts called “secret contracts”. These secret contracts not only solve for correctness, but also for privacy, as they can conceal the data completely from the nodes on the network. Users and applications will be able to operate within an environment where it’s safe to include sensitive data.

Secret contracts unlock the massive potential of dApps and can directly impact industries like finance, credit, gaming, machine learning, and healthcare that depend on the transfer of sensitive data. Every one of these industries, along with a laundry list of others, require strict privacy and can benefit in a decentralized platform that can perform private computations.

Enigma’s Privacy Technology

Enigma aims to use a combination of cryptography-based privacy technologies like Secure Multi-Party Computation (sMPC) and hardware-based privacy technologies like Trusted Execution Environments. The team is more than well-prepared to utilize both technologies effectively with their expertise in sMPC and their ongoing collaboration with Intel around secure hardware and privacy-preserving technologies.

Secure Multi-Party Computation is the foundation for Enigma’s secret contracts. By utilizing this structure, Enigma can ensure that its data queries are completed in a distributed manner without the need for a trusted third-party. The encrypted data is split amongst different nodes and each performs computations at the same time without sharing information with one another. No single node ever has the full data set and every node has a random and seemingly meaningless piece.

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) is a hardware-based privacy solution where secure hardware is used to protect the data that is being used from leaking outside the hardware itself. Enigma combines TEEs with MPC, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, and Fully Homomorphic Encryption to create a much more robust privacy solution.

Coinplan is very excited to feature Enigma because they are not just another blockchain product. They are a project that is bringing a blockchain solution that is truly private and applicable to almost any industry looking to keep sensitive data hidden. They are knocking down milestone after milestone on their roadmap and slated to release their Discovery Testnet this quarter, 2019 Q1. This will be based around the TEE’s mentioned above and is the focus of their Intel collaboration.

You can view ENG inside Coinplan’s Privacy Portfolio here.

To learn more about Enigma, please take a look at these helpful links:

Enigma Website

Enigma Telegram

Enigma Full Overview

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