Enigma Development Update — July 2019

New developers, new code, a global tour, and preparing for the ENG snapshot and Genesis Game!

Hello from the Enigma team! What follows is our latest development update, covering our progress over the month of July. For the first time in a while, we’ll update you about how hiring is going on the development side. Then we have some updates on how we’re supporting our recent testnet developer release of Discovery. Finally, you will learn about our busy upcoming travel and conference schedule, where we’re excited to go hands-on with developers in workshops and hackathons. Read on!

Hiring

We’re excited to be actively growing Enigma’s technical team in Israel! We are currently hiring for several positions that include a Rust Protocol Engineer, a NodeJS Protocol Engineer and a DevOps Engineer.

The talent pool in Israel is very rich, in part because STEM is highly ingrained in all facets of society. Israel has one of the highest concentrations of engineers, mathematicians and physical scientists in the world, and is the highest ranked country in Turing Award winners (the highest award in Computer Science) per capita. It’s similarly situated in the number of Fields Medal and Noble Prize winners per capita. Specifically in the fields of Cryptography and Game Theory — extremely relevant to our space— one would be hard pressed to find better concentration of talent than in Israel. Most of the recent advancements considered in the privacy-preserving computing space (MPC, ZKPs and TEEs) are attributed, at least in part, to Israel or Israeli scientists.

To date, we have received over a hundred applications, interviewed a couple dozen candidates, and already hired three new people, two of whom are currently being onboarded, and a third person who will join us in the coming weeks. As a result, a significant portion of our team bandwidth has been invested this past month in the long-term efforts of having a stronger and more capable team, who will continue to develop the Enigma Protocol and grow our development ecosystem. Our hiring continues, so if you know of (or are) a great candidate in Israel, let them know they are welcome to apply — and send them this application form!

Development Work

In preparation for our upcoming testnet and mainnet releases, we defined and started implementing the infrastructure that will be required to support our network when it goes live. As part of this work, we are defining a set of system tests that will stress test the current iteration of our protocol increasing the breadth of possible scenarios. This is an expansion of our prior work of our Testnet Developer Release consisting of a dockerized environment that runs on a single host. We are thus leveraging our container-based architecture to deploy a large number of nodes across different geographies to simulate the network load and latency of the upcoming Genesis Game through Kubernetes.

Coding-wise, our efforts centered around addressing a variety of edge-cases that continue to get uncovered through our existing suite of integration tests in order to stabilize our code base, like the following:

Just today we pushed out a new version of our Enigma protocol codebase, doing a synchronized merge to the master branches of our three main repositories: contract (PR#124), core (PR#201) and p2p (PR#196). This automatically pushes new docker images for the discovery-cli that secret contract dApp developers use, as well as a new release of the EnigmaJS client library. If you are a developer, you can learn more about this upgrade on our Developer Forum.

In addition, there is work in progress to decrease the gas price of those operations involving access to the Enigma state. When using collections (i.e. a vector, a list or a hash table) the cost is currently higher than what we believe it should be. As a result, this is an active area of research and development that we will document further as it unfolds.

Events and Community Updates

Now that the developer testnet has been released, we’re excited to spend the second of half of 2019 engaging much more actively with our global community! We’re prioritizing a number of developer-focused conferences and hosting our own meetups in cities around the world. Some of our upcoming events in the next three months include (*deep breath*):

All this is exciting, and potentially exhausting, but completely worth the time investment as we work hard to scale the Enigma ecosystem and help bring privacy and security to the decentralized web. We believe being active with our community is the most valuable thing we can do to further Enigma’s mission of driving mass adoption of decentralized technologies.

We will be supported in all of these events by the Enigma Collective, the core of our global community. Collective leaders and members around the world help host events, produce educational materials, run nodes, build secret contracts, and work with our core team to increase awareness of Enigma, decentralized technologies, and privacy. We are incredibly grateful for their support. If you’re interested in learning more about the Collective — and maybe applying — you can read more on the Enigma blog!

We hope this update was valuable to you and that you remain excited about our upcoming networked testnet launch and the dawn of secret nodes! We’ll have more updates on that soon. Keep in mind the mainnet ENG token snapshot will take place from August 26th through September 24th! In the meantime, please enjoy this Collective-produced video on the promise of secret nodes :)

Onwards and upwards,

The Enigma Team