Hello to the Enigma community,

For those who aren’t familiar with me, my name is Guy Zyskind, and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Enigma MPC, the core development team behind the Enigma protocol.

The idea of Enigma began in 2015 with papers I published while at MIT. First was Decentralizing Privacy, which now has over 1,000 academic citations. The second was Enigma: Decentralized Computation Platform with Guaranteed Privacy, which described the initial framework for what would later become known as secret contracts. Together these papers outlined a vision for a future where data could be encrypted and protected while still unlocking new value for individuals and institutions all over the world.

Of course, as anyone who has attempted to build in the blockchain space knows, there are very large differences between writing a paper, building a company, developing a protocol, and creating a community that supports a project and its future. Along the way, our team has had successes and failures, made mistakes and learned from them, and formed relationships with visionaries all over the world who share our mission to build and scale new types of privacy solutions. Builders and stakeholders in this space often face unique and difficult challenges, as well as an extremely high degree of uncertainty — but we also have the incredible opportunity to make big differences in the lives of millions.

Today I’m writing to share more details about our recent news, including the launch of the Enigma consensus blockchain on mainnet and our full embrace of the multi-chain vision for Enigma as we move beyond Ethereum (while still working to maintain our support of the Ethereum ecosystem and developers). Even though there is still uncertainty ahead, and while this post cannot answer every question, I hope you come away understanding one thing above all else: our team remains fully committed to the Enigma protocol, the Enigma community, and our shared vision for a privacy-first future. Together with you, we are building a stronger foundation for Enigma.

Enigma Mainnet, Incentivized Testnets, and SCRT

As we announced last week, the Enigma mainnet blockchain was launched on February 13th, 2020 by over 20 validators from the Enigma ecosystem and community. This mainnet is a proof-of-stake-based blockchain based on Cosmos SDK/Tendermint and secured by a new native coin, Secret (SCRT). If you’d like to see the network in action, take a look at this community-built blockchain explorer.

This standalone Enigma blockchain now forms the consensus layer of the Enigma protocol, replacing Ethereum. There are substantial details in our launch post about key features of this network, including network economics, the introduction of delegation, and on-chain governance features that give control of the network to the community. These features help ensure the Enigma protocol remains secure and sustainable long-term. Please read our full announcement post to get more familiar with the Enigma mainnet blockchain.

While the network currently does not include support for secret contracts, this is the current primary focus for our development team. We hope to submit a proposal for this functionality to be included in the network within the next six months. You can follow our team’s current thinking and the community conversation around this integration of secret contracts on the Enigma Developers Forum. While at present there is no requirement for validators on the Enigma network to use SGX, this integration (if accepted by the network) would likely necessitate active validators to have SGX enabled.

Since this initial launch announcement, there have been many, many questions from the Enigma community concerning SCRT, including how to acquire SCRT tokens and how to become a validator for the Enigma blockchain. As stated before in our announcement, we are continuing to explore legally compliant means for SCRT to be distributed more widely.

One option our team has been exploring is an incentivized testnet for secret contracts. As mentioned, we are continuing to develop and research secret contract functionality that will necessitate the use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) like Intel SGX. Given this significant change, it makes sense to run multiple testnets before the introduction of this functionality to the mainnet Enigma protocol.

We know that there are many members of the community who were looking forward to the Genesis Game and the opportunity to become long-term node operators for Enigma, including acquiring their own hardware. We’d like to hear your thoughts about such a potential incentivized testnet period, including any ideas and feedback you may have, and see if there’s widespread community interest. We’re therefore sharing a form below where you can express such interest and provide feedback, and so that we can be in touch with you directly.

Please click here to fill out the incentivized testnet interest form.

In response to other community inquiries on SCRT, for now I must repeat the statement we have made before:

As our team and community of validators work to support the new Enigma mainnet, preserving the existing Enigma ecosystem and its vibrant, committed community is of the utmost importance to us. At the same time, however, Enigma’s development team is committed to ensuring that our operations and future actions are in strict compliance with relevant regulations. This is necessary in order for our development team to continue supporting the development and success of the Enigma mainnet alongside the community.

We have worked tirelessly to explore legally compliant avenues for facilitating a token swap between the ERC-20 ENG token and the mainnet SCRT coin. We are continuing discussions with our legal counsel and regulators to identify an effective means of facilitating a swap that complies with all relevant securities regulations, but for the time being, our team is not able to proceed with facilitating a swap. We appreciate your patience and will update you as things move forward.

Open Development and Governance

Another priority for our development team moving forward is our commitment to exposing more of our research and development activity. With the Enigma protocol now under community governance and operation, all development by our team must be proposed to and accepted by the network using the on-chain governance module. This was always the best path forward for Enigma, and one our team is happy to embrace.

Given this, it makes sense for as much of our research and development to be exposed to the broad Enigma community as possible, in real-time, even in its earliest stages.

Our core team will be sharing more of our thinking around Enigma, protocol features, use cases, and our development progress using the Enigma Developers Forum, as well as potentially other mediums (such as GitHub). In addition to the thread linked earlier about secret contract integration, here are a few other threads that have been started already by our team and community. We’d love your thoughts!

Why the Cosmos Move Doesn’t Mean We’re Leaving Ethereum

WASM Implementation

Network Key Management

Input/Output/State Encryption/Decryption protocol

Block Explorer for Enigma Blockchain

I’m personally very excited about this new path forward, and I know everyone on the team shares that excitement. The ability to have a community-run blockchain, with on-chain governance for decision-making, was always the best path forward. This enables our team to focus more on development, leaving it up to the network to decide (and communicate to us) what they find beneficial. In the past week alone since the Enigma mainnet launched, and since we started taking these proactive steps towards putting our development in the open, we’ve seen unprecedented engagement in the forum, including from developers outside of our ecosystem.

What Lies Ahead

With our recent settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission behind us, our team is happy to place our full focus on development of the Enigma protocol. Our team and community are working hard to place Enigma on a solid foundation for the future so that the protocol itself can become a foundation pillar for the decentralized web. While there have been many questions from the community around next steps, please understand that the settlement and claims process is extremely complex and is expected to take months. The only place to receive updates on this process is through official Enigma channels, such as this blog. Please exercise caution and do not rely on any unofficial channels for these updates.

From a development perspective, I am more confident than ever that the protocol is on the right track. With the recent launch of mainnet and our commitment to transparent and open development process, we have also committed internally to develop in smaller batches so that we can iterate faster. We’re already seeing clear signs that this is the right choice. Development decisions that used to take many weeks before have now been reduced to mere days. We’re also excited to expand our participation in the Cosmos ecosystem.

As our team’s development on secret contracts integration continues, you can follow our progress on our GitHub, the Developers Forum, and this blog. If you want to discuss anything with our team and community or have questions and ideas about Enigma and its development, please use our forum or official Discord. You can also follow our announcements on Twitter and Telegram. If you are looking for official and accurate information, please consult the official channels listed here (as well as our website).

I cannot express enough how much our team values the support and patience of the Enigma community. As I hope this post expresses, we are rededicating ourselves to the Enigma protocol, community, and ecosystem going forward. We know there is much work ahead of us to build trust in Enigma and our development — and our team is committed to that work. Ultimately, the strongest foundation for Enigma is the people who will stand behind its vision for a privacy-first future, confronting all challenges and putting everything they have behind the protocol.

Please continue working with us to build that future. It is worth creating. Thank you for sharing and believing in our mission.

Onwards and upwards,

— Guy and the Enigma Team