Hello to the Enigma community! The Enigma team has just returned to their homes and offices across the globe from an incredible time in Europe. From Web3Summit and Devcon4 to all the great meetups in between, it was an ideal opportunity to connect with a whole universe of talented developers and thinkers — as well as to bring the global Enigma development team together for their first working retreat.

Here’s a quick trip report from our travels, complete with video and photos!

Berlin

Fred (left) and Can (right) arrive at Web3Summit!

Monday, Oct. 22nd —The Enigma team (Can and Fred) arrives for the first day of Web3Summit. We packed our day with meetings and caught up with old friends and potential partners. The conference was just the right size — expansive, but still intimate — and it felt like you could talk to anyone and everyone. We also had a great dinner with thought leaders in the space to discuss the future of the ecosystem (and humanity).

Tuesday, Oct 23rd — Our second day at Web 3 Summit. We spent the morning preparing for our midday Enigma workshop. We were able to attend a few sessions over the course of the day, including Starkware’s presentation on privacy and a session where Gavin Wood went over the Substrate model.

The Enigma session itself was heavily attended, with people standing at the back at the room. Can gave a brief introduction to the project to set the stage, and Fred went into a technical deep-dive of the Enigma network. The crowd was extremely engaged and asked very relevant questions, which we were pleased to answer. Overall, it was an extremely successful session!

Fred presents a detailed look at Enigma on stage at Web3.

Can giving an overview of fundamental applications for Enigma’s platform.

Wednesday, October 24th — Our last day at Web3Summit. We took in a few of the presentations and got ready for our evening Meetup with Ocean Protocol and Chainlink!

The Meetup was very well attended, with lots of engagement and great questions for all the presenters. Thanks to our friends at Ocean Protocol for hosting and recording the talks! We were fortunate to have extensive conversations with both the Ocean and Chainlink teams after our presentations. Here’s the Enigma presentation in full:

And here’s a look at the crowd!

After working from a blockchain co-working space called Full Node on Thursday (and some productive meetings with other projects!) it was time to head to Prague…

Prague / Devcon4

Enigma was well represented in Prague, bringing the majority of our dev team to Devcon4! This was one of our most anticipated events of the year, with thousands of Ethereum developers from across the world in attendance.

Monday, October 29th — We attended a private, invite-only event focused on secure hardware where Fred made a presentation on technical details of Enigma’s upcoming Discovery network. We’ll have more to share soon!

Tuesday, October 30th — Both of our development teams from the US and Israel got together in a tight shared AirBNB space. For two whole days, with barely any breaks, we locked ourselves in that room and we went into detail over every aspect of Discovery architecture, internally debating the pros and cons of different design choices. The (occasionally heated) arguments led to several breakthroughs on what our design should look like.

Among the topics discussed and for which decisions were made is our handling of key management. Being the first end-to-end encrypted public network, this is a contentious and delicate issue to manage. We’ve made great progress deciding how key management should be handled in the early iteration of the network, and going forward. The goal is to build more robustness and security over time.

Other crucial topic relates to the design of sharding in our system, and what kind of consensus protocol this would require (both short term and long term). The main decision reached was that for each epoch (the basic time unit in our system), we will shard the network into worker groups, each entrusted with the maintenance of a single secret contract. This discussion let to resolving the difficult and very important question on how to reach consensus across each worker group inside of an epoch and outside of it.

From left to right: Isan, Victor, Fred, and Elichai hard at work on Enigma!

Wednesday, October 31st — Devcon4 kicked off in full. We attended a number of different sessions focused on privacy (including P4 Private Periodic Payment Protocol and Iden3). We also had some interesting meetings related to our tech, privacy and UX verticals. For instance, we met with OmiseGo to discuss our approach to scalability as well as their plans with respect to plasma, privacy and DEXes. In addition, we met with a senior executive at Intel to discuss potential next steps for our collaboration. Stay tuned…

Thursday, November 1st — We presented for the first time at Devcon4! Guy presented our sybil-resistance project in collaboration with Datawallet at the Intel Trusted Compute workshop. Members of our team attended a number of interesting sessions, including the Ethereum P2P talks and a libp2p meeting. We also attended presentations focusing on MakerDAO, Casper, Verifiable Delay Functions, and Ethereum Randomness. We had a great team lunch and practiced for our main presentation.

Our CEO and co-founder Guy Zyksind presenting on stage!

Friday, November 2nd— Time for the main event! Guy and Isan presented on privacy-preserving smart contracts at 12:30, complete with a full demo of “secret voting”, an announcement of our EGG (Enigma Growth Grants) program, and an exclusive look at some partner code! We were also able to go into some of the history of Enigma, including how we got started at MIT.

The room filled rapidly after Enigma’s talk began. Our presentation was very well received by a super engaged crowd, with great follow-up questions and a lot of interest afterwards. Here is a Periscope video of the full presentation (thanks to Victor for recording!):

And by popular demand — here’s our presentation slides in full!

Above: One of the 40 awesome Enigma Devcon4 slides!

If you’re interested in seeing the full secret voting video — in addition to a complete walkthrough — check out what Adi recently published:

Our team was also able to attend a Plasma workshop. This was a good recap of the state of research with an in-depth presentation about Plasma Cash. We’ve learned that the most mature Plasma implementations (Loom’s Plasma Cash and OmiseGo’s Plasma MVP) still only support UTXO-based proofs — although more general implementation could theoretically leverage zero-knowledge proofs or TrueBit’s interactive proofs. The deposit / withdrawal requirement is still a usability challenge, especially with withdrawals which become liquid only after a challenge period (defaulted to seven days). To mitigate this, Loom proposed a market for auctioning withdrawals at a discount during the challenge period to independent validators. Another issue with withdrawals is that Ethereum miners have an unfair advantage. They can view and validate the challenges submitted in transaction candidates in an attempt to steal rewards. A fascinating conversation!

We spent the rest of the day meeting with other development teams, including a long and productive conversation with Chainlink about the viability of oracles. We tried our best to meet as many members of Enigma’s global community as we could, including some of our incredible Ambassadors. We also made a few media appearances, including shooting an interview with our friend Michael from Boxmining!

Outside of everything above, we had a number of meetings with current and prospective partners and had uncountable awesome interactions with developers in the Ethereum ecosystem. We’re very fortunate and proud to be contributing our privacy and scalability solutions to such an incredible space. Everyone is so committed to building a better, more decentralized future.

Thank you to everyone we met in Europe, and to everyone we’ll meet soon! Next stop for Enigma: South Korea! For the first time, our team will be attending a major Asian conference and speaking about the present and future of Enigma as well as our privacy and scalability solutions. Check out more information on the event at buidl.kr — and we’ll share more soon…