This post is co-authored by the Enigma and Chainlink teams.

Today the Enigma and Chainlink teams are happy to announce a new collaboration, focusing on the integration of our protocols to enable powerful new use cases for secret smart contracts. Below we outline some of the near-term and long-term opportunities afforded to developers by harnessing and combining the benefits of both protocols.

As projects, Enigma and Chainlink share many commonalities, including strong technical teams, focuses around solving privacy and scalability, and a collaborative mindset. By enabling connection between the two networks, novel solutions can emerge to some of the biggest problems facing the blockchain space, particularly privacy, scalability, and external connection. This will open up new product offerings in areas like decentralized finance (DeFi), as well as solutions for traditional industries, such as in credit, healthcare, machine learning, global trade, and many more.

To date, Enigma and Chainlink are already working together as members of larger industry-wide initiatives and alliances. Both projects are contributors to the Trusted Compute Framework (TCF) working group inside the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. In addition, both Enigma and Chainlink are recognized as “best-in-class” protocols within Outlier Ventures’ Convergence Stack, a collection of open-source technologies that promise to revolutionize the way data is used, consumed, and protected. This collaboration will allow us to expand upon these ongoing efforts and create new value for both ecosystems and communities.

Areas of Collaboration

As mentioned, integrating Enigma’s and Chainlink’s protocols can have both near-term and longer-term benefits for developers and users. In the short term, we are exploring how Chainlink’s price oracles can be directly integrated with Enigma’s secure computation protocol to improve usability and end-user experience. One key use we have identified is facilitating ENG/ETH gas price conversion with Chainlink oracles.

“Secret contracts” on Enigma interoperate with other smart contracts using an Ethereum callback mechanism. When giving a task to Enigma, a user pays for both the secret contract computation and Ethereum callback in ENG. Since it is the Enigma worker who submits the Ethereum callback transaction on-chain, paid ENG must include the ETH gas cost of the callback to maximize usability. Therefore, the going rate for ENG/ETH must be available on-chain. By integrating a Chainlink oracle, a median conversion rate can be calculated from multiple data sources, mitigating the risk of price manipulation.

In the longer term, more complex integrations can maximize the combined and independent power of Enigma’s secure computation protocol and Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network. One such integration is the use of Chainlink nodes to submit oracle data as tasks to Secret Contracts. Application developers will be able to use APIs available via Chainlink to trigger events in their contracts.

Some potential use cases in which the two protocols can address existing challenges in the blockchain space include:

Off-chain payments: a non-crypto payment could trigger the release of data within a secret contract.

Social integrations: a Twitter “following” list could be used to whitelist certain users, and be updated in real-time.

Cross-chain activity: events on Bitcoin and other blockchains could be used in the logic of secret contracts.

On the enterprise side, Enigma provides an implementation of the Trusted Compute Framework that is compatible with Ethereum mainnet. This can bridge the needs of enterprises with the benefits of a public, permissionless blockchain. Enigma enables common enterprise use-cases around logistics and tracking, secure data-sharing, access-control, and identity management. A Chainlink oracle integration closes the loop between real-world data feeds, private computation with Enigma, and the public Ethereum blockchain.

At a high level, all these use-cases involve using Chainlink nodes to submit task data to a secret contract on Enigma. The diagram below outlines a high-level potential model for this integration. (Please note that for the purposes of creating a concise diagram we have made simplifications omitting some essential processes, such as data verification).