Enigma is only as strong as its community. In this series, we highlight some of the awesome Collective members helping us build a more secure future with our privacy solutions. Read on to meet them — and to learn how you can join us!

The Enigma Collective is comprised of talented individuals who represent our project and communicate our technology and vision to their communities and industries. Our goal has been to build a program where everyone feels valued, learns daily, builds skills, and has direct access to the Enigma team. Being involved at the early stages of an ambitious blockchain project like Enigma is an incredible opportunity — and joining the Collective can mean gaining lifelong friends and colleagues.

With the Collective active in over 15 countries, we are slowly building what we believe is the best core community in the blockchain space — curious, committed, and kind. Members bring many different skills and backgrounds to their work, including development experience, artistic talents, business acumen, community-building expertise, and much more.

Today we highlight Laura Weindorf, another member of the Enigma Collective who has been immensely helpful in testing our protocol and helping developers get started building their own privacy-preserving applications. Read on to learn about her passions — and why our work at Enigma matters to her.

“I want to see people in charge of their own identities and data, getting paid by corporations to use it. I want to see that people are free and control their money.”

Who are you?

My name is Laura. I love learning about things I’m passionate about. Lately that’s been the Rust programming language, Enigma’s secret contracts, world literature, and astrophysics — though I’m a bit behind in that class at the moment. I’m also on an inner journey to, as the Gnostics would say, “know thyself.” I love traveling and exploring. As a kid I used to pretend I was an explorer discovering new places on my expeditions in the woods. I also used to pretend I was Wonder Woman.

Being next to a body of water, whether it’s a lake, river, ocean, pond, or a little water garden is the best thing in the world to me. Oh, rain too, is the best. I sleep to rain sounds at night. I get these “Secret Escapes” emails periodically with pictures of beautiful places around the world surrounded by the bluest water. I look forward to traveling to those places.

One of Laura’s many inspiring pieces.

My mother was a great watercolor artist and encouraged me to make art. I was always interested in math and science. I never thought of myself as artistic or creative. Then a couple of years ago I got this incredible urge to create art and I haven’t stopped. What inspires my art is the way man-made structures get broken down by nature’s weathering processes as viewed in a natural landscape setting. I have no idea why I’m attracted to that, but that’s what I explore in my art.

Why Enigma?

I love Enigma. It’s such a great project and team. They’re passionate, committed and brilliant! (Editor’s note: we’re blushing.)

At the end of my Udacity program I was researching a data blockchain project called Ocean Protocol and I saw a reference to Enigma as part of their compute providers diagram and thought, what is that all about? When I saw Enigma’s focus on solving issues around data privacy and scalability, I thought “Yes!” That’s exactly what is needed for decentralized technologies.

I’ve felt for a while that privacy and scalability in terms of data is critical to mass adoption. I had read that some companies were working on private blockchains because they wanted the benefits of blockchain technology without exposing their data on a public blockchain. Data privacy is a significant impediment to companies that need to keep their data private, but the same is true for individuals.

Enigma’s approach, enabling computation on encrypted data, is really interesting. And you can save state data in a secret contract, which helps with scaling of smart contracts.

What do you enjoy working on?

I have years of experience in software development that includes programming, design, architecture and testing. I originally wanted to be an aeronautical engineer and work for NASA, but my grandfather talked me out of that and into computers.

I love programming, so it’s always a great day for me when I can get comfy in my home office and start coding. I’ve always been drawn more to the behind-the-scenes, or infrastructure side of software, especially networking and communications. When I was first learning Unix and the C programming language, I actually wrote a program that interacted with the modem to dial and connect to another UNIX machine. I loved it. The idea that I could connect with the hardware and cause data to move across a cable was super exciting.

What do you want to see in a decentralized, privacy-oriented digital future?

I want to see people in charge of their own identities and data, getting paid by corporations to use it. I want to see that people are free and control their money. I want to see people getting paid to lend any spare computing power to the decentralized network. I want to see costs come down by automating and eliminating inefficiencies. I want to see voting on the blockchain. And most importantly, I want to see what else happens, what other innovations are made possible with blockchain that we haven’t even imagined yet!

Why should someone join the Enigma Collective?

I really wanted to stay involved and continue my work with smart contracts and blockchain infrastructure, so I applied to be part of the Enigma Collective. I was so excited when I got the email from Tor and Aaron. They’re great! I love the authenticity and passion of the team and I feel very proud to be a part of the Collective. So now I’m helping out with developer support and learning secret contracts and Rust.

If you resonate with what Enigma is all about and want to be part of a great group of people all contributing in their unique ways, you should join! Everyone in the Collective is super nice and supportive.