Hello to the Enigma Community!

It’s been a busy and extremely successful last few months at Enigma. We released our Discovery testnet v1.0, announced our partnership with Intel focused on privacy-preserving smart contracts and hardware solutions, launched our developer community forum and protocol documentation, and much more.

If you’re unfamiliar with Enigma, here’s the quick summary: Enigma is a blockchain-based protocol that uses groundbreaking privacy technologies to enable scalable end-to-end decentralized applications. With Enigma, “smart contracts” become “secret contracts,” privacy-preserving smart contracts where input data is kept hidden from nodes in the Enigma network that execute code. Without this functionality to protect sensitive data, blockchains and smart contracts are essentially useless. Enigma and secret contracts are the key to creating a more decentralized future — a fairer, sustainable future that we believe will benefit everyone on Earth.

The winner of the Enigma Community Artwork Contest.

We have talked a lot about Enigma since our project began at MIT in 2015. In our most popular article, we discussed the importance of Enigma’s privacy protocol to a decentralized future. We’ve also presented numerous important use cases for Enigma’s solutions.

Recently, we’ve had two incredibly successful contests where our community demonstrated their visual creativity — the Enigma Infographic Contest and the Enigma Artwork Contest. This gave the Enigma community an opportunity to show their enthusiasm for our protocol and the decentralized future that Enigma is enabling with its privacy solutions.

Today we proud to be launching our third and most important contest yet: The Enigma Community Writing Contest. Now is your chance to add your voice to ours in expressing what a decentralized future powered by Enigma can mean for you and the world at large. It is our future we are building, and we want to work with you, the community, to develop the narrative of Enigma and to explore the importance of Enigma to our futures.

Read on for details about the contest and how you can win ENG for sharing your vision!

How Do I Participate?

The basic instructions for the Community Writing Contest are simple. First, compose a written piece that addresses the following prompt:

What will a more decentralized future look like? Why is pursuing this future important to you? And most importantly, what role will Enigma play in the pursuit and construction of that future?

Your goal is to make this future and its value feel more tangible for readers. Your piece can approach this prompt from any viewpoint. You can also compose your piece according to any writing style. Please let your creativity run wild: you have the chance to imagine any future you wish.

Want to write an academic-style article on the importance of decentralization and Enigma’s protocol to personal liberty in the digital era? Go for it!

Want to write an informative article on the technical significance of Enigma and on potential Dapps that could revolutionize existing industries? Yes, please!

Want to compose a fictional story on what life in a decentralized future 100 years from now might be like? Awesome!

Haikus? Sonnets? Blank verse? All encouraged!

The best pieces will be creative, informative, and insightful. Your submission should be high-quality, compelling, and express your vision of what Enigma is and why it matters. Your written piece can be academic, informative, technical, fictional, poetic… It must, however, incorporate Enigma and “secret contracts” — our privacy-preserving smart contracts that power the Enigma protocol.

A few more guidelines:

Make sure that your submission is high quality; this means edited, well-researched, and accurate. We want to see your best work! Plagiarism, mis-information, inaccuracies, or frequent copywriting errors will disqualify your submission.

Submissions should be written in English. (If you’d like to submit an entry in another language, get in touch with our team via the Enigma Telegram.)

To repeat ourselves: your submission must be written. Videos, speeches, podcasts, etc. will not be accepted. (Perhaps in a future contest…)

Please keep the length of your submission between 200 and 5,000 words. Each individual may submit up to two entries.

Submissions must be made by and attributed to an individual author or authors; corporate authors or submissions without a specific author will not be considered.

Do not mention token prices, market caps, or availability on exchanges — this will mean disqualification. Also, keep it tasteful. Submissions that are vulgar, inappropriate, or that call for violence towards any person, project, coin, or company will not be accepted.

If you’re looking for inspiration, you can learn more about Enigma on our website and on our blog — especially the Enigma Solutions Series.

Please feel free to draw inspiration from our previous community contests: the Infographic Contest and Artwork Contest.

Prizes will be awarded as follows.

First place: 500 ENG Second place: 250 ENG Third, fourth, and fifth place: 100 ENG

(If there are enough truly outstanding submissions, the Enigma team reserves the right to award additional prizes…)

How Do I Submit My Writing?

1. Publish your writing on your blog, website, or public platform (such as Medium or Steemit). Please ensure that your work is public so it can be easily viewed by the Enigma team and community — and please share it widely!

2. Submit your work to the contest via Twitter. You must tag @EnigmaMPC and include $ENG and the hashtag #whyenigma in your tweet. Please also include a link to your submission.

Example: “Here is my article for the @EnigmaMPC writing contest! https://medium.com/linktomyarticle Let’s change the world together! $ENG #whyenigma”

Your tweet must be made by Monday, August 6th, 11:59PM Pacific Time. Again, only two submissions are allowed per individual.

3. The Enigma team will collect all submissions and select up to five of our favorites as finalists. Our selections will be based on creativity, effort, quality, and relevance to Enigma. We hope that your writing makes us think, that it makes us smile — and we really hope it ignites a conversation and inspires everyone to imagine what Enigma is, what it means, and what our project might eventually become.

When selecting finalists, we will take into account social engagement: the number of retweets and likes on the submission tweet, as well as where your content has been shared. However, the original publisher of the content will not be taken into consideration. It doesn’t matter if you published your article on the front page of New York Times or if you published your article on your personal blog. What matters is the quality of your writing, your vision, and how well your submission engages and inspires our community.

4. We will then contact selected finalists and announce a voting round where community members and vote for their favorite. More details on this will follow after the submission window has closed.

Are you ready? The Enigma Community Writing Contest begins… NOW!