Outlier Ventures announces strategic partnership with Enigma Protocol

Outlier Ventures Convergence Stack strengthens as Enigma brings the capacity to secure the decentralised web

London, August 27, 2019 — Leading blockchain and Web 3.0 venture platform Outlier Ventures has made a significant investment in, and has become a strategic advisor to Enigma, a decentralised secure computation protocol.

Partnering with the Outlier Ventures platform will enable Enigma to scale and diffuse their network at a new rate. The partnership will enable Enigma to join a family of world leading internet protocols, developers and computer scientists in a multi-generational project, all focused on building a new and more equitable data economy.

To realise the potential of this partnership Enigma and Outlier Ventures will be working on technology integration, reference implementations of the network, and creating developer resources. Outlier’s in-house technical teams will support in the development of tooling and work directly with Enigma’s code, building bridges and planning key integration points that connect Enigma to other distributed ledger technology in The Convergence Stack.

At an operational level they will become members of The Convergence Alliance, a unique community of open source protocols, enterprise, start-ups, government bodies and academia chaired by Outlier, leading the next phase of the Web. With founding members including Deutsche Telekom, Land Rover Jaguar and SAP, the alliance will serve as a gateway for Enigma to connect with Outlier’s ecosystem of smart cities, corporate partners and developer communities.

Enigma’s core mission is to secure a decentralised web, where secret nodes in the network perform computations over encrypted data. Their ability to secure any kind of computation — not just transactions — for thousands of decentralised apps requiring private computation and secure data will be hugely powerful for Outlier’s partners. Their cutting-edge cryptographic methods and secure hardware solutions to turn ordinary smart contracts into secret contracts will mean users, companies and marketplaces within the stack can utilise and monetise sensitive data while keeping it private.

CEO Jamie Burke, Outlier Ventures, commented:

“With Enigma, we share the important mission of reducing the world’s reliance on insecure cloud computing platforms by offering peer-to-peer, privacy-preserving, decentralized and open source alternatives. They bring huge and immediate synergies to our growing stack of investments both at the Compute layer and more widely and we are looking forward to integrating them into our ecosystem.”

CEO Guy Zyskind, Enigma commented:

“We are excited to be partnering with Outlier Ventures towards our shared mission of driving global mass adoption of decentralized technologies. Outlier’s vision, team, and dedication are unmatched in our industry. Together we will continue working to create significant new value for individuals and institutions across the world.”

About Outlier Ventures

Outlier Ventures is a venture platform that supports the development and growth of new technologies. To do this we advise and invest in talented teams, and support businesses which create value for an open data economy.

Established in 2013, Outlier were Europe’s first venture firm dedicated to blockchain technology. As early investors in the space, we foresaw the coming together of key technologies like AI and IoT with blockchains — which we termed ‘Convergence’ in 2016.

Outlier Ventures have developed an industry-leading investment thesis, based on the convergence of decentralised technologies with other advancing technologies including artificial intelligence, robotics, and the Internet of Things. The convergence of these technologies will support a new open and decentralised data infrastructure. This creates next generation data technology which will drive the evolution of the next internet paradigm “Web 3.0”

Outlier work with seed and growth stage startups as well as larger businesses who are committed to the vision of an open and decentralised data infrastructure.

The team is 30 people strong, with a global presence including London, Toronto, Chicago and Amsterdam. With specialists in token economics, research, legal, marketing, and technology, we bring a powerhouse of support to founders and partners.

Outlier Ventures have invested and partnered with some of the most impressive projects in the decentralised space including, IOTA, Ocean Protocol, Fetch.AI, SEED, Sovrin, Haja Networks, and most recently Agoric as well as a number of further planned ambitious investments. The firm also maintains strategic partnerships with its corporate and academic network. https://outlierventures.io/

About Enigma

At Enigma, our mission is to ensure global adoption and usage of decentralized technologies. We are working to achieve this by bringing privacy and the ability to use sensitive data to blockchains.

Enigma is a secure computation protocol which is able to run blockchain functions, or smart contracts, on sensitive (secret) data. First founded and researched at MIT in 2015, Enigma’s network of “secret nodes” can perform computations over encrypted data at scale without ever exposing the raw data itself. Smart contracts built with Enigma become “secret contracts”, allowing developers to create thousands of new, valuable solutions.

Enigma’s open-source protocol is designed to be blockchain-agnostic, helping solve privacy, scalability, and usability for any blockchain, as well as the applications built on them. Enigma will have powerful applications across industries such as personal data, identity, healthcare, credit, finance, and many others. Anyone can begin building secret contracts today using Enigma’s developer testnet. More information can be found at: blog.enigma.co/developers

Enigma’s team is made up of experienced researchers, developers, and businesspeople. The Enigma core team formed at MIT, including co-founder and CEO Guy Zyskind, author of Enigma’s whitepapers (800+ academic citations) and one of the world’s foremost experts on privacy and decentralization. Enigma has also built a global community of privacy advocates and enthusiasts numbering in the tens of thousands who support our project, mission, and vision for a decentralized future. Additional information on our company, team, and technologies can be found on the Enigma website and company blog: blog.enigma.co