Hello to the Enigma community! After a busy week in the northeast US, which culminated with our first public demonstration of secret contracts on the Consensus stage, we are happy to share a brief look back at our successes, learnings, and experiences. Here’s a day-by-day recap!

Thursday, May 10th

Enigma co-founder and CPO Can Kisagun presents to the UN.

We arrived early to NYC Blockchain Week for some very important meetings. In one highlight, the Enigma team was honored to be able to present to the United Nations in New York City about our solutions for data privacy. We learned a great deal about the many different data challenges that organizations like the UN face on a regular basis and received great feedback on our solutions.

Friday, May 11th

Enigma co-founder and CEO Guy Zyskind presents at MIT.

On Friday, we diverted from New York briefly so that our CEO Guy Zyskind could present at Blockchain in Action at the MIT Media Lab. Speaking to a room of industry leaders investigating the future of blockchain and artificial intelligence, Guy presented on Enigma’s potential and the importance of privacy to a decentralized future. Other awesome speakers included Stuart Haber, Anders Brownworth, and Brian Behlendorf. It was an insightful and illuminating day for all involved!

Guy reprises his earlier presentation to industry leaders in Cambridge, MA.

Sunday, May 13th

Part of the Enigma team meets over the weekend to strategize.

The Enigma team is normally distributed, working across many different cities such as San Francisco, Boulder, Chicago, and Tel Aviv. We took full advantage of our time together in New York to work hard on our strategy and architecture, as well as other important initiatives like community, partnerships, and marketing. It was extremely meaningful and exciting to have our US team together in the same place!

Monday, May 14th

The lines. Oh my goodness, the lines.

Consensus finally kicked off in full force, and the Enigma team bravely faced the lines and the crowds head-on. We held a number of important meetings with current and potential partners throughout Consensus, and unfortunately we had to miss many exciting panels and presenters as our day was full from 7AM until the evening hours. We also skipped a number of ICO presentations and partner announcements.

Tuesday, May 15th

Guy presents our first public look at secret contracts on stage at Consensus!

The big day at last! After another full day of meetings, Enigma was finally able to show an implementation of secret contracts on stage during a brief ten minute slot on Tuesday afternoon. We were able to get through a lot of great content in a short time!

The theme of Consensus 2018 was “Go Live”, and the Enigma team was determined to show meaningful progress towards our promises. In a short video, we demonstrated a coin-mixing application that today takes a significant amount of engineering and research to implement properly, but that can be implemented with Enigma in just a few lines of Solidity code.

This first look is just a simple example of a secret contract that helps demonstrate Enigma’s capabilities, but we must stress that Enigma’s potential vastly exceeds this one basic application. With only a few minutes of time, we were able to give a small taste of the potential power of our protocol.

Unfortunately, due to a mistake by the AV team, our video was cut off a full minute before its conclusion. Since many members of our community were not able to witness the presentation — and since we didn’t get to finish — we will be posting our full set of slides as well as our demonstration video to our channels ASAP so everyone can see everything just as we intended!

A room full of incredible developers and supporters.

Next up was an amazing meetup with the team from Zilliqa, who flew in from Singapore for Blockchain Week. On an extremely rainy night, we still managed to pack the room! Our CEO Guy and Zilliqa’s CEO Xinshu Dong gave excellent presentations of our respective projects, then proceeded to hold a 30+ minute Q&A session afterwards that was of very high quality — thanks to those who asked the great questions!

It was a pleasure to present to such a committed and curious community, and many attendees were supporters of both projects. Enigma and Zilliqa did not announce a partnership — both projects agree that official partnerships should demonstrate meaningful progress towards a shared goal — but we are looking at potential avenues of future collaboration.

And of course, there was also plenty of networking, pizza, and beer. One member of the Zilliqa community even recorded the whole experience!

Watch here: https://www.pscp.tv/w/1OyKANEEEkqGb

Zilliqa CEO Xinshu Dong presenting on Zilliqa and their recent progress.

The very attentive audience.

Wednesday, May 16th

Guy explains Enigma’s origins to Ran Neu-Ner.

Our final full day in NYC featured yet more meetings and some heartfelt goodbyes to members of the team returning to their usual locations. However, we were able to have one more great opportunity to talk about our project and promise, sitting down with the great Ran Neu-Ner from CNBC’s Crypto Trader. Multiple members of the Enigma team were able to share their perspectives and stories.

It was a pleasure to talk with Ran and his team about the potential of Enigma’s protocol and how solving for privacy can finally enable truly decentralized applications. It was also meaningful for us to tell our personal stories and talk about our deep connection with Enigma’s mission and vision.

Can talks with Ran about his vision for the future of Enigma.

We hope to have more to share about all these great conversations soon…

So what’s next?

Enigma continues to work hard on developing our protocol, and with testnet slated to launch this June, we remain completely focused on our goals.

Expect more news soon about our growing Ambassador Program, our plans for international community expansion, more new hires, and new partners who will help us achieve our vision for a more decentralized future.

In the meantime, please join the Enigma community channels! If we met you in NYC — or if we just missed you — we’d love to have you join our Telegram and other communities and stay connected with our team and supporters.

Onwards and upwards,

The Enigma Team