Hello from the Enigma team! With our ENG token distribution taking place tomorrow, October 11, we are taking a moment to reflect on Enigma and Catalyst — both where we are currently and where we are going.

As you’ll read below, we have already accomplished a great deal and in some cases (as with Catalyst development) exceeded our own expectations. However, we know that we stand at the beginning of a long journey alongside our users, partners, and contributors, and we’re excited to share a bit more about our vision with you. This post will be our most thorough explanation yet of the importance and scale of the Enigma protocol, our protocol roadmap, the long-term functionality of the ENG token, and our vision for Catalyst on Enigma.

Enigma’s primary aim is to revolutionize the way data is shared, aggregated and monetized through the Enigma decentralized data marketplace protocol and the utility token for the Enigma protocol, ENG. While blockchains are a form of a decentralized database, their biggest flaws are scalability and privacy. Enigma seeks to enable the scalability of blockchains by providing a complementary off-chain data network, where larger quantities of information can be securely shared and processed without incurring severe on-chain costs. As the decentralized web continues to scale, our protocol will provide a necessary second-layer network that can handle more data, faster, and with better privacy features. We believe this is the missing piece necessary for mass adoption of decentralized applications.

As we shall explain, this is an ambitious vision that rivals the scale of large projects like Ethereum and Filecoin while complementing their functionality. In addition to our data protocol, we are building products (such as Catalyst) that will democratize the tools for interacting with and consuming data. As you’ll read below, on our data marketplace and in all products built on the protocol, the ENG token is the key to the network.

Where We Are

Today Enigma is better positioned to achieve our long-term vision than ever. We successfully completed our ENG token sale, raising our full hard cap of $45 million within hours. Out of over 40,000 interested contributors, we accepted contributions from over 5,000 individuals. We have built a community of tens of thousands of Enigma supporters, and our product Catalyst has over 15,000 users. With this sound financial standing and broad support and engagement from our community, partners and investors, we are very optimistic about the potential of Enigma.

However, optimism is nothing without execution. We have prioritized having a tangible product that serves a strong use case for the community from day one, and Catalyst has been available in alpha for months. Excitingly, we are well ahead of our initial development schedule for Catalyst. Many of the features scheduled for Q1 2018 are already available: we have released live trading capabilities and minute-level data granularity, and we are also finalizing the integration of our backtesting engine with our live trading engine. This week we are adding the ability to see the availability of data on Catalyst in real-time. Our continued strong execution will show that we are well-equipped to achieve our goals in this fast-moving and evolving space.

Our priorities for the immediate future remain developing our product and protocol, but equally important is the development of strong partnerships inside and outside the crypto space. We are proud to be a member of MIT’s STEX25, a startup accelerator focused on fostering collaboration between MIT-connected startups and member companies of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP). We will stay in constant communication with our community as we form new partnerships and relationships.

This next phase of growth is challenging and exciting, and we look forward to continuing to justify the support you’ve shown us. As you are our partners on our journey, we are excited to give you a closer look at Enigma’s and Catalyst’s future.

The Enigma Protocol

The original narrative of the web is one of radical decentralization and freedom. During the last decade, the web’s incredible growth was coupled with increased centralization. Few large companies now own important junctures of the web, and consequently a lot of the data created on the web. Data is quickly becoming the most valuable digital asset, and is the backbone of every system. As discussed in our Beyond Catalyst: Enigma’s Vision for the Future of Data post, the only way to capture the value of all data on the web is by starting from scratch and coming up with a single, open-source protocol for permanently storing, sharing and processing of data. In other words, we need to build a data marketplace for the web, one that is unstoppable (and therefore decentralized), open and secure.

In practice, to build a data marketplace, the Enigma protocol needs to implement the infrastructure for a decentralized database, with storage and computational abilities that far exceed those that blockchains offer. While all blockchains are, in a manner of speaking, protocols for decentralized computing and data storage, their poor scalability and lack of privacy features limit potential use-cases. We need a second-layer network that can handle more data, faster, and can provide better privacy features — and that’s where the Enigma protocol comes in.

Our protocol is based on the ideas presented in the 2015 Enigma whitepaper, as well as in our subsequent work (paper, thesis). It aspires to complement a blockchain (of any kind) with an off-chain data network (essentially — a single, always-on decentralized database), in much the same way that payment networks (e.g., Raiden) offer better financial transactions scalability. Essential to the Enigma network is the ENG token, which we are distributing to our token holders on October 11th.

If successful, the Enigma protocol could become the cornerstone of the new decentralized web — storing the long tail of data for people, apps and organizations. In the shorter-term, it can become a necessary piece of building decentralized apps. If Filecoin (or others) is designed to assist with permanent file storage, and Ethereum (and other blockchains) enable transfer of value and strong validation properties, Enigma can become the database of choice for these apps. Achieving this vision is a long term endeavor that will require us to venture far into the frontiers of computer science. Given our background and prior work in the space, our ties to academia, our dedicated partners and investors, and the funding contributed by our community, we believe Enigma can meet these ambitious goals.

The milestones below provide a good first approximation of the development process we need to work through going forward. As our work grows and evolves, these milestones may shift somewhat, but not our goal of revolutionizing data.

We’ve chosen to capture our milestones in phases to allow us to reasonably determine what parts will become available when, and under which constraints. Phase 1 deals primarily with setting the foundation for a data marketplace. It includes the on-chain portion, dealing with contextual information about data-sets, namespaces, and subscriptions. These contracts will be developed in Ethereum, and will operate directly with Enigma tokens (ENG). At this point, all data-sets will be provided off-chain by one or several data providers, but there will be no network logic connecting these (yet).

Phase 2 includes the first implementation of an off-chain network, which will run on a federated network of known nodes (a-la sidechains). This could also be considered the MVP of the Enigma protocol — one that operates under a restricted threat model.

Phase 3 is where things get really interesting, and we launch our open off-chain network where anyone can become a node and provide storage and computational resources in return for ENG tokens. Note that there will never be additional tokens created — incentives are derived solely from fees, and from the incentive pool reserved by Enigma at the birth of our token tomorrow. Finally, Phase 4 is where we introduce important privacy features for protecting data in the network. This would allow extending the usability of our data protocol to practically all kinds of data streams, including those that include personally identifiable information (PII).

This is our vision for the future of the Enigma protocol. But in order to fully comprehend this vision, we must understand where Catalyst fits in as well.

The Future of Catalyst

As we mentioned above, Catalyst is the first product that will be implemented on the Enigma protocol, and it is already available for public use in alpha. We believe that delivering a product to run on our protocol is essential for a number of reasons:

Providing immediate value. By providing reliable and detailed crypto-financial data and the tools to process it, Catalyst fills a large immediate need for investors and traders in the crypto space. Any serious project should provide strong value to the community that supports it from day one. Demonstrating our ability to execute. The Enigma team is committed to delivering on our long term vision, but we don’t ask our community to rely solely on promises. By making our project public-facing and immediately providing an open-source product for anyone to use, we hold ourselves accountable. Establishing and testing the Enigma protocol. In its alpha stages Catalyst’s data is built centrally, but as we develop our protocol we will migrate all Catalyst data to the Enigma network. Building and scaling Catalyst provides a powerful stress test for the Enigma protocol, ensuring that it can operate at scale.

To the first and second points above, we are well ahead of our initial roadmap for the Catalyst product. For example, we have released live trading four months in advance, currently supporting two exchanges and in the process of adding a third. We are also actively expanding the data sets available for consumption on Catalyst.

We can frame the future development process for Catalyst into three concurrent processes that describe Catalyst’s main functionalities:

Catalyst Core. This is the backbone of Catalyst — a fully-featured trading engine that can interface with many exchanges and data sources. It provides developers (professionals and hobbyists) with quantitative investment tools for crypto-assets. Catalyst UI. A web-based interface for managing and testing your strategies on the cloud. Short-term, we plan to introduce a browser-based IDE for developers, accompanied by a control panel for connecting to various exchanges, executing strategies and measuring performance. At a later stage, our goal is to introduce a Drag ’n’ Drop Strategy Generator, targeted at non-developers. Using visual tools, this editor would allow anyone to create programmatic, data-driven strategies without any programming knowledge. Catalyst Data. This is where the Enigma protocol and Catalyst converge. As a first phase, Catalyst data will be centrally stored on vanilla cloud servers (as is the case currently), but data consumption would already be facilitated through ENG tokens. Once the Enigma protocol is operational, all Catalyst data-sets will be migrated to the decentralized Enigma data marketplace.

What Happens Now

ENG tokens will be distributed to our contributors tomorrow, October 11th. Whether or not you were able to participate in the ENG token sale, there are many ways to get involved with the project.

Try Catalyst. The Catalyst alpha is available at www.enigma.co/catalyst. Come experiment with Catalyst and join tens of thousands of other users.

Join our community. Our Telegram community is over 7,500 members strong, and we have a new Discord channel of over 1,000 members. If you’d like to register for our Slack (12,000 users and home of our developer community), please message @thisistor on Telegram with your email address. Public Slack registrations are still currently closed. For further important Enigma announcements, follow this blog and our Twitter.

Submit content. If you are using Catalyst and are interested in writing about your experiences and learnings, we’d love to publish your work. We’ve published some great articles from community members previously, so please get in touch with @thisistor on Telegram if you’re interested.

Help us grow. As we are building a protocol and a platform, our success is tightly linked to our community support and awareness. We’ll continue to actively share news and development updates with the community on a weekly basis, and you can help us spread the word within your networks about our project and vision.

With your support and efforts, we can and will create the decentralized future of data. A very sincere thank you from all of us at Enigma!

The Enigma Team

www.enigma.co