This developer testnet finally enables privacy for general computations, enabling dApp developers to create significantly more meaningful and secure applications than what we have seen to date. Our team of most capable and highly dedicated engineers has been working on the underlying protocol that makes this release a reality for over a year. Countless hours of research, thoughtfulness, and design have now been poured into this release, which we’re excited to share with you!

We have been using this very same developer network for the last three months ourselves for integration testing and network testing, and we are now opensourcing it for anyone to develop with. Furthermore, it has the very same features and characteristics of the network that Enigma will have on mainnet, pending some minor improvements and successive iterations. This developer testnet is as close to the “real thing” as it gets.

The Discovery network starting up!

Our whole team is excited for all developers to begin building and help realize our common vision for a more secure, more sustainable, and more democratic decentralized future. As we’ve continued our development, we’ve remained in close contact and collaboration with numerous projects and individuals looking to explore use cases for Enigma such as DEXes, marketplaces, gaming, access control, governance, private transactions, and much, much more… so stay tuned!

As a reminder, here are the key new features of Enigma being included in this release of Discovery:

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.