Hello to all! The Enigma team is thrilled to bring you critical development news related to our privacy protocol as well as Catalyst, our first application. This news sets the stage for Enigma as we embark on a year full of major milestones and initiatives.

At Enigma, we’ve spent the past few months actively building, hiring, making new partnerships, and sharing our progress and plans with the community. Our vision is the Enigma privacy protocol: a second-layer network and foundational technology that solves privacy and scalability for any blockchain.

Today, we are excited to move one step closer to creating our complete vision for the Enigma ecosystem.

As we have written about previously, one of the key applications for a privacy protocol is in the creation of truly decentralized data marketplaces. These marketplaces require privacy and a solution like Enigma’s in order to function properly — otherwise they are vulnerable. Enigma is building such a decentralized data marketplace to help our protocol realize its full promise.

As a major step forward in development, we are excited to announce that we have launched the Enigma Data Marketplace contract on the Ethereum testnet. The Enigma Data Marketplace — powered by ENG utility tokens — will initially serve Catalyst, our professional platform for data-driven cryptoasset trading and investment. When fully deployed on the mainnet, this will mark the completion of Phase 1 on the Enigma roadmap.

Alongside this launch, we are also making some initial community-curated data sets available for our more than 17,000 Catalyst users in order to seed the marketplace.

Read on to learn more about the Enigma Data Marketplace, these initial data sets, and how you can participate right now.

A technical depiction of the Enigma Data Marketplace.

What Does This Mean?

At a high level, Enigma is creating a decentralized data marketplace that allows people, companies and organizations to contribute data, which users of the system can then subscribe to and consume. In the Enigma Data Marketplace, these subscriptions are handled in a decentralized manner through the use of smart contracts.

The data itself, its storage and transmission, lives off-chain. In that sense, the blockchain acts as the controller of the network (as was illustrated in the Enigma whitepaper), while the off-chain network handles everything else. In particular, the off-chain component handles everything from routing requests, verifying permissions, parsing and forwarding queries to the source (e.g. a database, a CSV file), and finally — routing the result back in the peer-to-peer network to the requesting client (encrypted with the client’s public key).

With this release, we are finalizing Phase 1 of development for the Enigma Data Marketplace. The current implementation includes the on-chain portion, dealing with contextual information about data-sets, namespaces, and subscriptions. The on-chain logic is coded in smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum network, and is operated directly with Enigma tokens (ENG). In this first implementation, all data sets will be provided off-chain by several providers, and their storage is managed independently from the logic embedded in the smart contract.

The first implementation of the data marketplace is designed for integration with Catalyst on the application layer. Data sets are consumed as premium data inputs to trading algorithms that derive trading signals from them in the quest to improve performance.

Initial data sets for use in Catalyst trading algorithms include the below.

With this release of the Enigma Data Marketplace, we are also releasing a new version of Catalyst, 0.5. This release includes integrations with the Enigma Data Marketplace contract, as well as some minor updates to address issues submitted by our community.

You can learn more in our complete documentation, which includes many more technical details about our smart contract, data subscriptions, authentication, and other aspects of the Enigma Data Marketplace.

What’s Next?

The Enigma Data Marketplace contract is currently deployed on the Ethereum testnet, and it has been submitted for auditing. Once the audit is complete, the contract will be fully deployed and functional on the mainnet. We will continue to update the community on this progress.

How can you participate in the Enigma Data Marketplace?

Crypto traders and investors: if you have not tried Catalyst yet, now is the perfect time to get up to speed. Check out our documentation and our video series, and join the tens of thousands of users who are professionalizing their crypto trading through data. When the data marketplace contract is active, you will be able to subscribe to data sources using ENG and consume them directly into your algorithms for backtesting and execution.

Data curators and contributors: we are always looking for additional individual and institutional data curators who are interested in becoming data providers for the Enigma Data Marketplace. For example, provided data sets could include order book, tick, or social sentiment data. If interested, please contact the Enigma team at [email protected].

This is exciting news — and again, still only the beginning. Our protocol is still in active development, and we will keep the community up to date on our progress. You should also stay tuned to our social channels, including this blog, to find out who else is helping us build a more decentralized future. We will have more to share soon.

Onwards and upwards,

The Enigma Team