Hello from the Enigma team! As always, we have been hard at work.

While we anticipate the imminent release of our data marketplace, we want to share more about where Enigma is headed. Outside of development, our top priority is communicating our vision — a future where we go beyond blockchains to create truly decentralized solutions for real problems.

From the start of the Enigma project at MIT, to the publication of our whitepaper in 2015, to the release of Catalyst and our data marketplace, our intention has been clear: create real, usable, groundbreaking solutions.

But while our intention was made clear, our ambition was not.

While we have acknowledged that privacy is a critical issue for decentralized technologies, we have not made the magnitude of its importance clear.

The simple fact is: Blockchains without privacy are useless. Smart contracts without privacy are useless. If these technologies cannot work without privacy, then new privacy technologies are the truly useful innovations.

Without privacy, data on the blockchain is completely exposed. If data is simply encrypted on-chain, it cannot be used for computation. Without privacy, smart contracts cannot use sensitive data. The applications for public smart contracts are minimal — they are unusable in healthcare, identity, finance, lending, and many more critical industries. Without privacy, decentralized technologies are just novelties.

By attacking privacy head-on, Enigma is creating a better solution and enabling the first truly decentralized — and truly useful — dApps.

The Enigma Protocol is bigger than a blockchain. It’s the beginning of a truly decentralized future. And this is how we’re building it.

This roadmap gives the most clarity to date around our approach to building Enigma. It is important to include a couple additional notes.

First, we are working on groundbreaking technology that will advance the frontiers of computer science. Thus, development progress will come from serious research that is subject to uncertainty. What we have listed above for our milestones and targets is a goal, not an inevitability. Meeting our timeline requires our full commitment and a supportive developer community. That said, we have previously out-performed our deadlines for Catalyst and data marketplace releases by a full quarter. The Enigma team’s focus and resolve is absolute, and we will work tirelessly to achieve our ambition.

Second, and similar to the above, certain elements of our roadmap are subject to change based on our research and development. Our vision is clear — to create a robust protocol that allows for truly decentralized applications and solutions, primarily solving for privacy. This roadmap as published is our current plan for making this vision a reality. We intend to improve upon it whenever possible and exceed all expectations, both internal and external.

Keeping these notes in mind, we will now explore each Enigma release a bit more deeply.

Discovery — 2018

Discovery is the first release to introduce the concept of ‘Secret Contracts’ — the ability to have the entire state of a computation encrypted throughout, thus hiding it from the public. This finally enables dApp developers to include sensitive data in their smart contracts, without moving off-chain to centralized (and less secure) systems. In other words, Discovery is the first to enable end-to-end dApps.

From a technical perspective, our secret contracts engine would be based on executing all contract code inside TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments), which can hide data even from a malicious host. Also, to make it easier on developers, we have decided to remain completely compliant with Ethereum. Developing a secret contract and a smart contract for Ethereum would be the same, with the exception that the developer will need to define the logic in the contract that needs to run privately (encrypted in Enigma).

Voyager — 2019

Voyager is the second major release focusing on even stronger privacy for dApps, which will utilize a new Distributed VM that would allow to run general-purpose secure Multi-party Computations (MPC). This would allow developers to choose between different execution engines for their secret contracts — either TEEs (Secret Contracts 1.0) or MPC (Secret Contracts 2.0).

In addition, this release would mark the first major step towards chain-independence. Enigma will launch its own chain (with a simplified consensus model and limited features), moving all dApps to its own network instead of relying on Ethereum. This would increase scalability by orders of magnitude. The chain will still use Ethereum as a parent-chain for additional security, until the later Defiant release.

Valiant — 2019

Valiant is when our main scalability and decentralization efforts take place. Usually, greater decentralization comes at a performance cost. In this major network update, the goal is to have a fully open and secure consensus in the Enigma Chain, while not diminishing (and actually increasing) performance through the use of more elaborate sharding.

Defiant — 2020

Defiant brings complete chain-independence. The Enigma network will operate its inner Enigma Chain completely independently of other networks, which may also mean moving the Enigma token from Ethereum to a native coin in Enigma. This would complete the process of Enigma becoming completely non-reliant on any other solutions.

In this release, we will also release major updates to cryptographic protocols (primarily around MPC), which both increase security and decentralization. Defiant is the definitive ‘training-wheels-off’ phase for Enigma.

The Defiant release is by no means the end of our journey. This is just another critical step towards our mission — growing and improving Enigma, scaling our developer community, achieving global adoption, and solving some of the world’s biggest challenges to privacy and true decentralization.