Enigma Development Update — August 2019

Progress on the ENG snapshot and protocol development, updates from Berlin Blockchain Week, and a shiny new website!

Hello from the Enigma team! What follows is our latest development update, covering our progress over the month of August. Sorry for the short delay — we were all just in ETHBoston for the very first Enigma-sponsored hackathon! We’ll be releasing a blog post very soon recapping our experiences and our learnings from the event.

August was all about keeping up momentum: the mainnet token snapshot for the Genesis Game began, and much of our development focus has turned to supporting networked testnet and the Genesis Game. Read on for more details and other news, including our partnership with Outlier Ventures!

Token Snapshot and Genesis Game

As we announced earlier, the Token Snapshot was scheduled to start on August 26th, and that is exactly what happened. We are taking a snapshot of ENG holdings by address at a random time every day (note that we are using GMT timezone as the reference for when a day starts and ends). We are currently recording those holdings, as well as keeping a running average, through September 24th.

We are making available the following page on our website: https://enigma.co/snapshot

where you can check the Token Snapshot process as it unfolds, and verify that you have the right amount of tokens in an address you control. As explained before, we will use the final average as calculated on September 24th to distribute test-ENG tokens for the Genesis Game.

Development Work

The entire development team, split both between Israel and the United States, continues to make steady progress towards our upcoming testnet and mainnet releases. On one hand, we continue to uncover edge cases where the network does not behave as designed. These cases appear more infrequently, and they are also harder to pin down, as they are less consistent and are usually the result of relative timing between certain events in the network. P2P#Issue218 is one such example that was subsequently addressed in P2P#PR228, as well as another issue that was identified with the state not properly being processed by the enclaves after propagation that is work in progress (Core#PR213).

In the core repository, the one that holds the code that runs inside the enclave and provides the Secret Contract runtime for Enigma, we are focusing on dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. Here are some recent highlights:

Enhanced some of the public interfaces that secret contracts expose in the Rust code Core#PR209

Fixed a bug in the encoding of dynamic types ( Vec & Vec<Vec> ) that can be passed as input parameters to the secret contract Core#PR210

& ) that can be passed as input parameters to the secret contract Core#PR210 Optimize (by reduction) the number of calls between the Key Management node and the Enigma Contract (Contract#PR139 and Core#PR212)

Adding nested serialization of the Epoch Struct inside the enclave (Core#PR217)

Activity on Enigma Core repo on Github

Last but not least, as we continue the work described in the July Update on the system tests, we are adding features on either repository to more swiftly provide the network configuration and infrastructure to run those tests, in this case by the inclusion of environment variables (compared to command line arguments): Core#PR215 and P2P#PR225.

Other Updates

Another big focus in August was our trip to Berlin for Blockchain Week! Our engineers Moria Abadi and Lena Kleyner presented the Enigma Developer release at Web3 Summit and Dappcon. This is where we gave the first public demo of Salad, our coin-mixing prototype built with Enigma! We also gave technical workshops at both conferences, walking participants through #Rustlang secret contract and working with the Enigma.JS API. The team was able to attend and present on a number of panels as well. Berlin Blockchain Week was a great opportunity for the team to stay up to date with recent work on important technology in the ecosystem, such as libp2p and WASM.

Another fun event was our standing-room-only meetup (co-hosted by Pantera. Bloxroute, NEAR, and Elixxir) on the Web3 stack, where engineer Avishai Weingartner presented our upcoming release. There were tons of great questions and the other presentations were awesome — Berlin is clearly a passionate city, especially when it comes to decentralization and privacy!

As mentioned earlier, our team has just returned from ETHBoston — the very first Enigma-sponsored hackathon! We had some incredible learnings and met some awesome teams, so much so that we’ll be publishing a standalone post to go over our experiences in the near future.

Want to know where we’ll be headed next? Good news — we just released a brand new version of the Enigma website! Whether you’re a developer, a node operator, a privacy enthusiast, or just interested in joining our community, we’ve made it easier to find what you’re looking for and get started with Enigma. The Community page is where you will find all of our upcoming events, as well as recent blog posts and media coverage, plus more information about the Enigma Collective!

We’re moving ever closer to our networked testnet launch and the dawn of secret nodes! Keep in mind the mainnet ENG token snapshot will continue to run through September 24th. In the meantime, please explore our new website and come talk to our team in any of our social channels!

Onwards and upwards,

The Enigma Team