Enigma Project, the team building a privacy and scalability protocol for any blockchain and creators of Catalyst, a platform for data-driven crypto investing and trading announced a major development milestone related to their privacy protocol as well as the Catalyst app.

As a major step ahead, Enigma informed the community regarding the launch of the Enigma Data Marketplace contract on the Ethereum testnet. The Enigma Data Marketplace — powered by ENG utility tokens — will initially serve Catalyst, the team’s first application. When fully deployed on the mainnet, this will mark the completion of Phase 1 from the Enigma roadmap.

The Enigma team stated:

“One of the key applications for a privacy protocol is in the creation of truly decentralized data marketplaces. These marketplaces require privacy and a solution like Enigma’s in order to function properly — otherwise, they are vulnerable. Enigma is building such a decentralized data marketplace to help our protocol realize its full promise.”

Along with this launch, Enigma is making some initial community-curated datasets available for the more than 17,000 Catalyst users in order to seed the marketplace.

Initial data sets for use in Catalyst trading algorithms include:

Enigma’s decentralized data marketplace allows people, companies, and organizations to contribute data, which users of the system can then subscribe to and consume. The data itself, its storage and transmission, live off-chain. The blockchain acts as the controller of the network (see more in the Enigma whitepaper), while the off-chain network handles everything else.

Now on testnet, the Enigma Data Marketplace contract has been submitted for auditing. Once the audit is complete, the contract will be ready to leave the testnet and be fully deployed and functional on the mainnet.