Protocol Development

The most exciting and anticipated milestone for many months was successfully attained right before the holiday season, and publicly announced on December 23rd, when we published that our public testnet was live.

We first deployed the latest instance of the Enigma Contract onto the Ethereum Kovan testnet, followed by launching the Key Management node along with three bootstrap nodes. As their name indicates, the bootstrap nodes are a small set of initial nodes that start the network, and that others can connect to in order to join the network. We then released a Docker image of a worker node that community members started downloading already to join and grow the network as node runners.

We created a new repository enigmampc/discovery-testnet to both provide instructions on how to run a node on testnet, as well as documenting the various addresses that you would need to configure your own node. As you will see on that repo, we have already deployed two versions of networked testnet and we expect to redeploy it a few more times as we test different aspects of our infrastructure. Every time we deploy a new version, the previous one becomes automatically deprecated. You can follow that repo to know the latest status of our testnet.

Now that we have the foundational infrastructure of our testnet in place, we continue our development work with the supporting components and applications that we build on top of it:

Salad: the first full-featured application running on the Enigma network that implements a coin-mixing service and provides transactional privacy on Ethereum that is more usable that the existing alternatives. In December, we also kicked off building wallet integrations for Salad so that users can mix coins easily from within a wallet interface. We expect these types of integrations to help boost accessibility, liquidity and awareness for transactional privacy.To learn more, read this Medium article or browse the source code on GitHub.

We are putting the final touches on a block explorer that: shows activity in the network, including contract deployments and computation tasks sent to the network, and whether they succeed, fail or are still pending; keeps track of the epochs, which are the units of time in the Enigma network used to manage the encrypted state shared between nodes; and keeps a log of the worker nodes in the network, displaying whether they are active and how many ENG tokens they are staking.

that: shows activity in the network, including contract deployments and computation tasks sent to the network, and whether they succeed, fail or are still pending; keeps track of the epochs, which are the units of time in the Enigma network used to manage the encrypted state shared between nodes; and keeps a log of the worker nodes in the network, displaying whether they are active and how many ENG tokens they are staking. We are also on the final stages of bringing up the infrastructure for the Genesis Game, which includes the automated scripting of sending computation tasks to the network (which will be randomly assigned to the active worker nodes in the network in order to test their uptime), as well as a dedicated website to track the results of the game. In preparation for the actual game, whose start date is still to be announced, we plan to run a series of short-lived Genesis Game Warm-ups so that participants can test their setups and have an assurance that they will be working and ready for the actual game.

You can expect more details to come on all of the above in separate blog posts over the coming weeks!

If you want to continue to stay up to date on the latest with secret nodes and the Genesis Game, we will publish announcements on this blog as well as on our official Twitter. If you are interested in running your own nodes and want to ask questions or receive support from our team and community, please use our Developers Forum or our Developers Discord.

Community Updates

You may recall in November that we held our first ever Open Community Call where we shared critical updates about Enigma’s present progress and exciting future. In the coming days we will be announcing the timing for our second Open Community Call! We currently expect this call to take place during the week of January 20th. To make sure you don’t miss our announcement, please submit your email using the RSVP form below — we’ll make sure you get all the information on how to join!

We’re also thrilled to be sponsoring ETHDenver 2020 in February, which promises to be an extremely exciting and well-attended hackathon! We can’t wait to see what people build. Our team has been making some preparations in advance of the event, and we’ll share more with you soon on our blog. Stay tuned for that and other announcements about live events!

Speaking of live events — if you’re interested in hosting your own Enigma-related event or working with our team to organize one, you should definitely join the Enigma Collective! The Enigma team and Collective are currently working on a number of exciting projects to help increase awareness and understanding of privacy issues inside and outside the blockchain space. If you’re passionate about privacy and interested in collaborating on these projects, you can learn more about joining the Collective on the Enigma blog.

2020 is a critical year in Enigma’s history. This is the year we complete our evolution from idea, to implementation, to a live testnet, to a working mainnet that becomes a foundational pillar for the decentralized web. For those of you who have been with us from the earliest stages of our project, thank you sincerely for all of your incredible support. For those of you building your own secret contracts or looking to operate your own secret nodes, we are honored to have your participation in the Enigma ecosystem. With you standing alongside us, Enigma can remain committed to building the solutions the decentralization space needs most. We will continue to rise to the challenge!

As we continue preparations for the Genesis game, don’t miss our updates — please watch this blog, our Twitter, or subscribe to our newsletter below!

Onwards and upwards,

The Enigma Team