Not many projects have the ability to achieve what Enigma has set out to do for blockchain. The current blockchain ecosystem has, without doubt, brought out some very useful projects and platforms that continue to revolutionize the world.

However, they still face a few problems, chief among them scalability, cost, and privacy. Many coins have taken steps to address the first two, and now Enigma wants to help bring privacy to every blockchain, including Ethereum.

How could this be done? Well, the platform has something called “secret contracts”. But first, they have to release their Discovery testnet.

Enigma TestNet Launch

Enigma will have their Testnet launched this June to introduce a concept in their roadmap called ‘secret contracts’. This will bring to blockchain “the ability to have the entire state of computation encrypted throughout, thus hiding it from the public”.

Earlier in March, the team at Enigma released their roadmap and outlined one ambition- to see cryptocurrency regain privacy. In their blog, they pointed out that “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.”

Although the testnet is expected before June 30, 2018, the mainnet will only be launched somewhere in Q3. Even so, the value of ENG coins could be much higher by then if ‘secret contracts’ succeeds. Already projects such as Ethereum could be among the first to tap into Enigma’s new technology.

Enigma secret contracts

The aim of secret contracts is to enable decentralized application (dApps) developers to securely add sensitive details to smart contracts. All these can happen without requiring the developer to move off-chain, which often means using a not so secure centralized system. What Enigma wants to achieve is to create the first platform that will facilitate end-to-end dApps.

As an off-chain network, it will facilitate the achievement of privacy and scalability for every other blockchain. Accordingly, this should lead to a scenario where blockchain is able to have secure and decentralized computations.

Blockchains will be able to tap into the Enigma protocol and utilize decentralized network nodes to perform data computations.

Secret contracts to solve privacy issues for Ethereum developers

Enigma has previously stated that they will remain compliant on the Ethereum network.

Now it appears its “secret contracts” will be useful in the process of having privacy on the leading smart contracts platform.

ENG developers want to provide decentralized applications (dApps) developers with a platform that offers the flexibility and ease required to help make data private.

After the release of its testnet and Mainnet, Enigma will allow dApps developers to work on Ethereum smart contracts so that data is hidden without the need to of going off-chain.

Enigma will provide a trusted execution environment, from which the main concept is to have a private storage facility that the platform uses to secure the data. What it means is that even the nodes performing the computations are not privy to the content in the contract.

Although the start-up will eventually take its solutions to other blockchain platforms, its focus at the moment is on Ethereum. And it could be that what they achieve continues ether’s dominance in the smart contracts arena.

The future of Enigma

As a part of what it can achieve, the Enigma team will rely on what can be built on that platform for future growth. The potential to gather further momentum after the testnet and mainnet should come from its three technological layers.

The Protocol layer- this layer on the Enigma privacy protocol will allow the platform to develop decentralized computation protocols for any sensitive data.

Platform layer- the protocol will allow for the creation of several other platforms like data marketplaces, AI exchanges among others.

Application layer- on this layer, several thousand dApps that need to access private data computation could be built, leading to exponential growth.

Enigma (ENG) price and market

Enigma has a circulating supply of 74, 836, 171 ENG tokens and a total supply of 150,000,000. Its current market cap is $106 million and about 4 million of its tokens have been traded in the last 24 hours.

The recent market decline impacted on the price values of Enigma, just like it did for every other coin. It currently is in the green in the 24h charts at $1.42 against the dollar. Watch out for further growth as its testnet approaches.