The testnet of private smart contract network Enigma has been launched, the developers announced in a Medium post published on June 11.

Per the announcement, the test network, dubbed Discovery, allows developers to start developing their decentralized applications (DApps). Furthermore, contracts hosted on the Discovery testnet will reportedly be immediately deployed on the Ethereum (ETH) network once Enigma has been implemented on the mainnet.

The newly launched network reportedly enables privacy for general computations, which enables DApp developers to create secure applications, according to the post.

The author of the post further notes that the developers have been using and modifying the network for three months and are now releasing it as open source software. The Enigma network relies on the Ethereum blockchain for consensus, but it hosts independent smart contracts written in a different smart contract (Rust, instead of Solidity.) As well, Enigma smart contracts are reportedly capable of calling any function of any Ethereum smart contract.

As Cointelegraph reported at the time, Enigma announced its partnership with chip manufacturing behemoth Intel on privacy research in June last year. Cointelegraph has also previously spoken with Enigma founder and CEO Guy Zyskind about the partnership, with Zyskind noting that they planned on making blockchains even more trusted and permissionless.

At the end of May, big four auditing firm EY open sourced the code of its Nightfall Ethereum private transactions solution and released it on GitHub.