Enigma Protocol — Making Blockchain enterprise ready

What is Engima. What problem it solves.

Everyone knows at the back of their mind that unless blockchain becomes enterprise ready, Crypto currencies and blockchains are going to die a slow death. But, there are nagging issues which are turning away enterprises from adopting blockchain in a large scale. Top two issues are privacy and scalability in the blockchain ecosystem.

You may ask what is so big deal about privacy with respect to blockchain. Answer is, Privacy has turned into a two edged sword for the blockchain. Distributed ledger and openness of the data stored in blockchain to all participants is now turning away enterprises from using the Blockchain in large scale, enterprise wide solutions. No major enterprise wants to provide free access to the business sensitive data to everyone in the organization. Scalability of blockchains has been hindered by the consensus mechanisms adopted by the blockchain networks, which slows down overall speed of the network.

Digital revolution has also created another interesting business opportunity cum problem. Data is everywhere and it is the most valuable asset in the 21st century. Only handful of companies are capitalizing on that. They are holding and monetizing it, but it can be used in a much efficient way. There are still demand for quality data from researchers, academicians, governments, enterprises, general public etc.

Enigma wants to fix all the above problems and more…

Decentralized, Open and Secure

Enigma has come up with an interesting solution for the problem. Separating the data and it’s processing. Enigma is a decentralized data marketplace protocol. It has its parts both on-chain on etherium and part of it is off-chain. off-chain takes care of major heavy lifting for the data processing and getting right insights out of the data, whereas on-chain manages the stakeholders, their activities and rewards.

Data Marketplace

Enigma data market place has 3 main stake holders. Data Providers, Data Consumers and Worker Nodes.

Data Providers, who have access to the data — such as mobile apps which can provide usage analytics, hospitals which generate data on the diseases and the treatment given, etc.

Data consumers, who wants to use the quality data — such as market research firms researching user behavior, drug research labs who need data on the allergies and side effects created by the medicines.

Worker Nodes are part of the off-chain component of the solution. Worker Nodes do not have stake in buying and selling of the data. Nodes get involved in storing the data, doing the computation, coming up with valuable insights from raw data. Nodes provide computational services to process the data without getting access to the contents of the data block provided. This is achieved by using a technique called Secret Contract.

Secret Contract

Enigma’s main focus is to provide decentralized computation platform with guaranteed privacy. Traditional smart contracts provide guarantee on the correctness. Secret contract goes beyond that and provides privacy of the data getting processed, a major missing feature in blockchain networks.

Secret Contracts can hide the data completely from the nodes. With these contracts, users and applications can operate in an environment where it’s safe to include sensitive data, which most real-world use-cases require.

Catalyst is an interesting implementation of the enigma protocol, which uses the secret contract to the fullest of it’s potential.

Catalyst

Catalyst is a dApp built on top of the Enigma protocol. It showcases the possibilities of the protocol. It is a data-driven crypto investment platform. It allows trading strategies to be easily expressed and back-tested against historical data, providing analytics and insights regarding a particular strategy’s performance. Catalyst also supports live-trading of crypto-assets starting with four exchanges (Binance, Bitfinex, Bittrex, and Poloniex) with more exchange support planned. Catalyst empowers users to share and curate data and build profitable, data-driven investment strategies.

Catalyst is one of hundreds of scenarios where enigma protocol can bring in major breakthroughs. Enigma can be applied across all industries — such as Healthcare, Pharma, Identity management, Airlines, Retail, Advertising etc., helping seamless flow of data between multiple participants participating in workflows involving data purchase, sell and processing use cases.

This leads to another question of how to connect with hundreds of blockchains in the world each having their own protocols, integration methods, way of working etc..

Enigma’s recent partnership announcement with AION will help enigma to plug this major operational issue.

Integration across Blockchains

Enigma has cemented a partnership with AION which provides a multi-tier system designed to address unsolved questions of scalability, and interoperability in blockchain networks. AION partnership will help enigma to plug-in to the different blockchains, each using their protocols and way of working.

Bright Future

Journey has just begun for the enigma. Now, with three years of fruitful contribution to the blockchain community behind it, enigma has now outlined an ambitious future road map till 2020 to become a major player in blockchain ecosystem.

Enigma Vision 2020

Enigma-Intel Partnership

Enigma has partnered with Intel on research and development efforts to advance development of privacy preserving computation technologies. As a part of this effort, Enigma will utilize Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions) in building and integrating groundbreaking privacy technologies.

Community building

Enigma has strong presence in the social media platforms. Add to that there is DevForum for building the developer eco-system, Partnership program for building Catalyst type of solutions for different industries/verticals and an ambassador program to spread the word.

Journey has just begun for Enigma….