Hello to the Enigma community!

Today we are extremely pleased to finally announce an important milestone: the launch of Enigma’s very first networked testnet!

As you may recall, our previous major milestone was the release of our developer testnet in June. This allowed developers to easily begin building secret contracts to power their own applications and solutions. Since then, we’ve released a number of monthly development updates and other posts keeping our community informed about our progress towards the mainnet release of Enigma’s protocol. As we mentioned in our first Open Community Call in November, we set a target of December 2019 for our next major milestone: our first networked testnet release. Today, December 23rd, we are proud to have achieved that milestone!

This new release, for the first time, allows “secret node” runners to begin connecting to Enigma’s Discovery testnet and staking their own testENG. Secret nodes are worker nodes that perform privacy-preserving computations in Enigma’s network — and they form its backbone and foundation. We are happy to share that thanks to our active community, the first independent nodes have already successfully connected to testnet! The secret contracts for Salad, Enigma’s coin-mixer implementation, have also been deployed to the Ethereum testnet and Enigma.

Reaching this milestone means we are also getting closer to the launch of the Genesis Game. During this period, secret nodes will compete to become the first mainnet nodes (genesis nodes) in Enigma’s network, earning the first network rewards and fees. Only 50 genesis nodes maximum will be selected, and it is critical that all node runners can maintain uptime and support the stability and reliability of the network. More information can be found in this exhaustive blog post describing secret nodes, the Genesis Game, network economics, and more. We hope you will choose to run your own secret node and help Enigma support the privacy of the decentralized web!

Privacy solutions have never been more critical to the blockchain ecosystem — and to our world. Networks like Enigma are needed more than ever. Please read on to learn what the release of our networked testnet means now for node runners, developers, and Enigma’s ecosystem and community.

What This Means For Node Runners

As mentioned above, this first release of Discovery’s networked testnet means the community can begin setting up their own secret nodes. Some dedicated community members have already successfully set up their own nodes and connected to the network! Our team and community will be available to provide support to other node runners and answer questions on our Developers Discord and Developers Forum.

Practical information on connecting to the testnet can currently be found on the Enigma Github. For questions pertaining to nodes and node setup specifically, please use the Nodes subforum of the Enigma Developers Forum. Over the coming weeks, we will be refining our nodes documentation and adding it to the existing Discovery documentation. We will also release more information in the coming weeks about staking providers who will be supporting Enigma’s network.

Note that this release does not mean the Genesis Game will start immediately. We are giving ample time for node runners to get familiar with Enigma’s network and to attempt to connect their own nodes. Our development team is also working actively to stabilize and strengthen our testnet, and further releases will follow before the Genesis Game begins. There is no hard date for Genesis Game to begin at this time. As mentioned in previous posts, we intend for the Genesis Game to run for four weeks, after which all genesis nodes will be selected as follows:

The top 30 nodes by genesis score are selected as genesis nodes. (Note that there will be a threshold for minimum uptime percentage in order to qualify. You will also need to have an average stake above 25,000 ENG.)

More nodes (up to 20 maximum) will be eligible for whitelisting based on contributions to the Enigma ecosystem, primarily those building supply-side tooling for workers and staking operations, as well as valuable but harder-to-quantify contributions during the testnet phase / Genesis Game (such as identifying critical bugs).

These genesis nodes will be the only nodes eligible to operate when Discovery launches on mainnet, and they alone will receive network rewards and fees until more nodes are added to the network. (Please consult earlier posts for details on how and when secret nodes beyond genesis nodes will be added.) The successful completion of the Genesis Game is our last major milestone before Discovery can be launched on Ethereum mainnet!

What This Means For Developers

This release does not change much for developers, as they’ve already been able to use our protocol documentation to get started building their own secret contracts. The only thing changing is that we will be providing even more support for developers and our developer community going forward!

Between our recent Gitcoin bounties and the outstanding projects built on Enigma at ETHWaterloo, there has been so much progress made exploring the possibilities of Enigma’s protocol. In 2020, we will be exploring even more hackathons (including ETHDenver), more bounties, and other developer initiatives. We also have a number of community members who have begun building their own longer term projects on and with Enigma — so stay tuned for more information on this!

If you’re interested in building on Enigma — or if you’ve already started — please let us know about your projects and ideas! Post on our Developers Forum or get in touch with our team using this inbound form. We’d be happy to reach out to you and provide whatever support we can!

What This Means For the Enigma Ecosystem and Community

This networked testnet release allows us to continue working with our great partners and collaborators towards the mass adoption of decentralized applications and smart contracts. It will also help support the adoption and development of early applications built on Enigma (such as Salad, a coin-mixer developed by the Enigma team).

As we recently announced in a co-authored post with Intel, Discovery is the first implementation of the EEA Off-Chain Trusted Compute specs for a public stateful network. With this release, we are taking a massive step closer to bridging the privacy needs of enterprises with the public Ethereum ecosystem, breaking down one of the biggest barriers facing mass adoption of Ethereum. Enigma has also begun actively contributing to the specifications of the Trusted Compute Framework v2.0. Our team and collaborators look forward to bringing you many more updates on this work in the near future. To stay up to date on this and other progress, please sign up for Enigma updates below!

What can Discovery do?

As covered in previous posts, including our developer testnet release and our implementation of the EEA’s Trusted Compute Specification, Discovery introduces a number of novel features.

Stateful (Encrypted) Secret Contracts

Secret contracts are capable of maintaining a state, allowing to persist encrypted data between private computations or different tasks. Stateful contracts enable many more use cases than stateless computations.

Secret Contracts decoupled from Smart Contracts

The Enigma network only relies on Ethereum as the consensus layer, but is otherwise decoupled from the requirements and limitations of Ethereum. This means that secret contracts can have their own runtime and programming language (Rust, instead of Solidity).

Private Outputs

In addition to private inputs, the network supports storage of computation outputs by storing the contract state encrypted on chain and sending results encrypted directly to the dApp user.

Ethereum integration

Secret Contracts may call arbitrary functions of any other smart contract deployed on Ethereum.

Peer-to-peer and storage layers

Completely redesigned from scratch, these functions are now an integral part of the Enigma network and no longer rely on Ethereum.

So what can I do now?

As covered above, there are a number of ways you can begin or continue contributing to Enigma and our ecosystem right now!

First, if you have interest in becoming a node runner and participating in our networked testnet and mainnet, please first read through our complete guide to secret nodes which covers many common questions, including around staking and rewards. You can also join our Developers Discord or Developers Forum to ask further questions and receive support directly from our team, or you can join our community-led Secret Nodes Telegram group. To start setting up, use our practical guide on the Enigma Github. If you’re an experienced node runner with further interest in Enigma, you may also reach out to our team directly by emailing info at enigma.co.

If you are a smart contract developer who wants to start building your own privacy-preserving “secret” contracts on Enigma, you can again join our Developers Discord or Developers Forum. You should also read through our full Developers Blog, which contains helpful information such as our Developer Quickstart Guide to Enigma and our Technical Resource Index.

If you are a project or enterprise who is interested in building on Enigma and learning more about what is possible, please read through our Solutions blog series. You can also read through some of what has already been built on Enigma by reading our Gitcoin Bounty Roundup blog post and our introduction to Salad, our coin-mixer implementation. Reach out to our team directly by filling out this form — we’d love to help you learn more!

Finally, if you’re a member of the Enigma community who just wants to be more involved with the project, you should consider joining the Enigma Collective! The Collective is the core of Enigma’s community and helps support the protocol in a number of different ways, from refining our visual identity, to working on business use-cases, to strengthening our developer community and documentation, to creating educational materials about data privacy, and much more. You will work directly with our core team and other Collective members and have special access to unique resources. There’s never been a better time — so we hope you choose to join us!