Today, in collaboration with initial block signers and validators from across the Enigma ecosystem, we’re excited to announce the successful launch of the first Enigma mainnet — a proof-of-stake-based blockchain based on Cosmos SDK/Tendermint and secured by a new native coin, Secret (SCRT). This is an extremely significant achievement for the Enigma community and a meaningful advancement toward our goal of further decentralizing governance and control of the Enigma protocol to support greater inclusivity and sustainability.

This blog post contains extremely important information about the goals, current functionality and future development roadmap of the Enigma protocol (including the integration of “secret contracts”) — as well as some answers to key questions about the mainnet launch — so please read carefully. You can find further discussion of this post on the Enigma Developers Forum.

Our Goals and Guiding Principles

As the core developers and stewards of the Enigma protocol, we have worked tirelessly alongside other members of the Enigma ecosystem and community to build and launch a secure and stable protocol — one that brings groundbreaking privacy solutions to public blockchains, for the benefit of all. We are committed to supporting the Enigma protocol today and in the future, providing leadership where necessary and helping to grow a passionate community of contributors dedicated to scaling privacy solutions and to public education.

In this work, our team and community have focused on answering the following questions:

How can we foster a strong, inclusive and sustainable ecosystem around the Enigma protocol?

How can we best achieve our expansive vision for marrying privacy and decentralization on the Enigma blockchain, including multi-chain support and widespread end user adoption of “secret” applications?

How can we minimize time-to-market both for the Enigma protocol and key applications utilizing the protocol?

How can we maximize short- and long-term benefits for existing members of the Enigma ecosystem as well as the broader Enigma community?

Our core development team, along with the community members and validators responsible for the launch and continued operation of the Enigma network, have certainty that this mainnet launch is the best answer to these difficult but critical questions, as well as the best path forward to ensure the long-term viability of the Enigma protocol and project. Overall, this is an extremely positive step toward realizing our shared vision for Enigma.

This post will explain as clearly as possible what changes have been and are being made to the protocol, why our team is in favor of these changes, and how they may impact the future development roadmap for secret contracts. You will ultimately find that these changes represent a substantially different direction from what our team has been able to communicate previously — but please keep in mind that each of the changes below was independently raised and voted on by key members of the Enigma community, following an exhaustive vetting of all of the project’s potential paths forward. Through that process, we and the aforementioned community leaders all reached the same conclusion: this new direction is the best way to position the network to achieve the goals outlined above and ensure the long-term viability of the Enigma protocol and project.

What’s Changing?

The current mainnet is a standalone native Enigma blockchain based on Cosmos SDK/Tendermint. Prior to launch, members of the Enigma ecosystem and community operated multiple successful testnets on the Enigma test network. Over 20 participating validators from across the Enigma ecosystem representing 10+ time zones jointly agreed on the genesis block of the Enigma blockchain, which was signed on Thursday, February 13th. These initial validators now govern and operate the Enigma mainnet. The Enigma blockchain is secured by a native coin known as SCRT (“Secret”), which is used for staking, governance, and transaction fees within the network. Its sole purpose is utility within the network. Node operators for Enigma stake SCRT. The new chain now serves as the consensus layer for the Enigma network (replacing Ethereum). As explained below, this choice preserves Enigma’s ability to support computational privacy for multiple blockchains (including Ethereum) while achieving independence. The new chain is inflationary, with 10–25% inflation per year depending on the amount of SCRT bonded in the network. There is also delegation, slashing, and new elements of on-chain governance. With governance activated, any changes to inflation can be proposed and voted on by the validators supporting the Enigma network. There is no minimum stake required to participate on the Enigma network. However, network participation is still capped at 50 workers (nodes). The 50 nodes with the highest stake are active in the network. If you are not among the 50 nodes, you can still participate in network staking by delegating your tokens to one of the 50 active workers. Full secret contract functionality is not available at launch, but the Enigma core team is continuing to develop this functionality, which will be voted on by the community for inclusion in a hard fork at a later date. More details follow on this below. Our team and community still actively support the existing Discovery developer testnet, which remains the best tool for developers building their own secret contracts and applications. We aim to ensure the developer experience remains as consistent as possible as we work to integrate secret contracts to the Enigma chain. Later in this post, we will discuss several options for how secret contracts may soon be integrated into this chain as well as others (including and beyond Ethereum). Given the above changes, including the introduction of delegation and slashing, the Genesis Game will not occur in its current design. Instead, anyone is now able to set up a staking node on the Enigma network or delegate to an active node, enabling a more open, decentralized, and permissionless ecosystem.

The rest of this post provides more details on these changes, new opportunities, the path forward, and some answers to key questions about mainnet.

Why Implement These Changes?

Our goals as stewards of the Enigma protocol are clear: support a fast and secure launch, help enable powerful privacy-preserving applications, and help maintain the community’s ability to iterate and implement best practices in the protocol. We are committed to building a sustainable ecosystem that developers, users, and node operators can depend on.

After many months of hard work and development, our technical and product teams identified critical opportunities for improvement of the Enigma protocol. We concluded that based on its architecture and network economics, the potential of Enigma’s protocol was not being maximized.

The proposed network economics for Enigma will make the protocol more sustainable and secure. The Enigma protocol as previously proposed was limited by a fixed token supply and a model that did not allow for delegation. This prevented professional and experienced node operators from participating in the Enigma ecosystem and hindered network security. There has also been considerable research done on the instability of fee-only networks and the positive relationship of inflation to protocol security. Here you can read more resources on how the addition of inflation, delegation, and on-chain governance create a healthier foundation for long-term network growth. This new approach allows the Enigma community to independently focus on our vision to bring privacy solutions to every blockchain, without needing to account for protocol-level changes from an external consensus layer. Previously, the Enigma protocol relied on Ethereum as a consensus layer. This created uncertainty, as Ethereum’s future roadmap is somewhat unknown, and also limited the type of use cases Enigma can support, due to scalability and compatibility issues with Ethereum. With this new approach, the Enigma protocol can realize its blockchain-agnostic vision (which dates back to the original Enigma whitepapers in 2015) while still taking advantage of the relative strengths of other blockchains, including Ethereum, through bridges and more modular forms of compatibility. A healthy and sustainable approach to protocol development relies upon the delivery of multiple successive milestones rather than ambitious leaps. This mainnet launch prioritizes stable features, community governance, and decentralization over the inclusion of codebases still in development. As an example: the EnigmaP2P library, the networking layer of protocol-wide secret (encrypted) state, is a deeply complicated code base and was the major ongoing focus of debugging efforts. Our development team believes it is a responsible choice to deprioritize support for network-wide secret state and reconsider it for future proposals based on product and ecosystem feedback.

Given our commitment to the Enigma protocol and our desire to maximize the long-term stability and potential of the protocol, we have worked with contributing members of the Enigma ecosystem to develop a clear and exciting path forward. We believe this will allow the Enigma protocol and its applications to launch faster, while incorporating all of the above learnings and avoiding similar challenges. While it involves major changes, we believe the mainnet launch and this future roadmap best serves Enigma network (present and future) and the stated goals around the long-term security and sustainability of the protocol.

What’s Next for Secret Contracts?

We’ve done extensive research on and put considerable thought into how to drive widespread adoption of secret contracts and bring private computation to the public blockchain ecosystem. While the Enigma mainnet launched today does not yet feature secret contracts, we are currently exploring integrating secret contracts into the Enigma chain directly. This means that every validator performs every secret computation and they achieve consensus on the results. As part of this, we plan to propose to the network an inclusion of a WASM-based runtime running inside Trusted Execution Environments (Intel SGX).

Integrating secret contracts into the Enigma mainnet enables the protocol to achieve fast consensus (with strong finality — a desired property lacking in PoW chains) and to interoperate with Ethereum and other blockchains. Our initial goal is to run secret contracts on the Enigma chain. In the early days, this initial design choice would allow secret contracts on Enigma chain to still work with encrypted inputs but forego secret state and encrypted outputs. (For a more detailed technical discussion of these tradeoffs and our thought processes, please visit the Enigma developer forum.)

Once secret contract functionality is enabled on Enigma, we plan to shift our focus to achieving interoperability with other blockchains and bringing our privacy solutions to more networks. In this regard, we are exploring contributing to IBC development efforts in the Cosmos ecosystem, as well as continuing our research into other approaches.

As the Enigma mainnet has introduced a governance module for validators, we (as the Enigma core development team) hope to submit a governance proposal to integrate secret contract functionality to Enigma chain in the next three to six months and plan to provide updates to the community on our development progress. This proposal would be voted on by the active validators supporting the Enigma network. If approved, this would bring secret contracts to the already-live Enigma mainnet.

Moving the Enigma protocol consensus layer from Ethereum to an independent, fast blockchain was a necessary step to deliver better infrastructure to developers and secure the protocol long-term. Our team remains excited for the future of secret contracts and we have full confidence in this direction.

Below we will answer some questions for members of the Enigma community:

For tokenholders

I hold some ENG (ERC-20) tokens. What do I do now?

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.

How do I acquire SCRT tokens?

We are continuing to explore legally compliant means for SCRT to be distributed more widely. Stay tuned for more information.

For node operators

Tell me more about the new Enigma mainnet.

The proposed network architecture is based on Cosmos SDK/Tendermint (similar to Binance Chain, Kava, etc.) The consensus model is a Tendermint proof-of-stake consensus. This provides properties that we’ve long described as important for secret contracts, such as strong consistency and no forks.

I want to run a node in the new Enigma network. What do I do now?

In the coming days, our team and community will release more detailed documentation on how anyone can set up their own node on Enigma’s blockchain. For now, the instructions to run an Enigma node can be found in this link.

What do network economics look like now?

The inflation range as set in the genesis block is 10–25%, with an initial rate of 15% annually. The target bonded rate is 67%. Any changes to this schedule will be proposed through network-wide voting and therefore will depend on the consensus of the majority of staking power in the network.

I was hoping to participate in the Genesis Game. Is that still happening?

The Genesis Game will not be happening in the form it was originally announced. The goal has always been to launch a strong and sustainable network, and the Genesis Game was meant to support that goal directly. Given the new architectural direction and our desire to create an open and permissionless network, the Genesis Game is no longer necessary. Instead, anyone is now able to set up a node and participate on the Enigma mainnet.

What are the system requirements now for Enigma nodes?

In this first iteration of Enigma network (mainnet launch), requirements are lower than they otherwise would have been. Importantly, nodes do not require SGX to operate at this early stage. Requirements are similar to other Tendermint-based networks. However, we would expect this requirement to change as secret contracts are integrated into the network.

Nodes require 24/7/366 uptime to avoid slashing, and it is recommended that operators set up an Ubuntu server on AWS / GCP / etc. with a public IP. Please consult our public documentation for more information.

Is there a minimum stake? What about slashing?

There is no minimum stake required for the Enigma blockchain. However, as mentioned earlier, only the 50 nodes with the highest stake can be active in the network. If you are not among the 50 nodes, you can still participate in network staking by delegating your tokens to one of the 50 active workers.

Slashing on Enigma works similarly to slashing on Cosmos.

For developers

Is this a relevant change for me if I want to build secret contracts?

This is not really a relevant change for secret contract developers. As secret contract features are proposed and introduced to the SCRT-powered Enigma network, we plan to release a new devnet for developers that maintains feature parity with the live Enigma network. For now, you can continue to develop on Enigma Discovery as before!

Will secret contracts still exist? Will they be written in Rust?

Yes, and yes. Working with Rust contracts in Discovery is still the best way to develop applications for Enigma.

When will the new network support contract logic?

The existing Discovery Developer Testnet is still the best place to develop secret contract applications. The SCRT-powered Enigma network is being deployed in phases: first transactions and staking, and then smart contracting functionality. If adding contract programming is voted on and approved by the network, we plan to continue development towards these milestones and build additional developer tooling.

If I create an application using Discovery, what will the transition to this new network require?

Our desire would be to make this eventual transition as seamless as possible. That said, this is uncharted territory. As stewards and supporters of the Enigma network, we will work to understand and keep up with developer requirements. The best way to ensure your needs are met is to participate in our open developer forum and keep our team and community in the loop on what you are building!

How will the new network interact with Ethereum?

One focus of our current research and development is constructing a bridge to Ethereum as well as other chains. As a part of these interoperability efforts, our development team is also exploring contributing to the IBC efforts of the Cosmos ecosystem. We plan to propose this bridge after the network votes on and accepts the deployment of secret contracts functionality on the Enigma blockchain.