Greetings to the Enigma community! After an exciting quarter, we’re thrilled to provide a full report on our progress.

Enigma is building the first platform for scalable, privacy-preserving smart contracts and end-to-end decentralized applications. And with the launch of our testnet in Q2, we’re one major step closer to our vision of a truly decentralized future.

Please read on for a summary of our development updates, community updates, partnership updates, team updates, and more.

Enigma Protocol Testnet 1.0 Launch!

After much anticipation, we released the very first version of our protocol to the public at the end of June. This was a huge milestone for Enigma — and one we promised to fulfill in our initial roadmap. The entire Enigma development team worked hard for months and delivered a phenomenal release. We could not be prouder of their effort and the result!

At Consensus 2018 earlier in the quarter, we first publicly demonstrated “secret contracts” — Enigma’s privacy-preserving smart contracts. If you’re a smart contract or dApp developer, you can now begin building your own secret contracts!

If you’re looking to get started, our protocol documentation is now available at www.enigma.co/protocol. We have also launched the Enigma Developers Forum, which is live at forum.enigma.co. Join us there, and you can be one of the first people to create what we believe is the future of smart contracts.

Partnership Updates: Intel and More

Intel VP Rick Echevarria presents on Enigma at Cyber Week 2018.

Just before the launch of our testnet, we had one other major announcement: a partnership with Intel focused on research and development efforts to advance development of privacy preserving computation technologies.

Both Intel and Enigma are committed to solving the largest challenges facing blockchains: privacy, security, and scalability. We’re excited to continue collaborating with Intel to advance our protocol and privacy technologies for public blockchains, as well as expanding and strengthening our working relationship. In coming quarters, we’ll have more to share about further collaborations, events, and initiatives, as well as demonstrations of our solutions. You can read more about our collaboration on Intel Vice President Rick Echevarria’s blog.

While we continue to have daily conversations with numerous projects and potential enterprise and government partners, we will also be sharing more information in the coming weeks and months about our early protocol partners — projects and companies that are proud to be building their solutions on Enigma. We’re growing an incredible ecosystem of builders that share our vision for a decentralized future powered by technology that provides scalable privacy. Stay tuned…

Enigma Ambassadors — Going Global!

One of our proudest moments in Q2 was the launch of the Enigma Ambassadors Program. We wanted to create an opportunity for our incredible community to get more involved with our project and use their diverse skills and backgrounds to help us achieve our vision.

We had an incredible response in the weeks after launching the program, with hundreds of applications. Of these, we chose our initial cohort of Ambassadors — over thirty incredible individuals representing fifteen countries, each with their own unique perspective.

Head of Marketing and Growth Tor Bair with two Enigma Ambassadors in Berlin.

At Enigma, we believe we are only as strong as the community that supports our project. Our Ambassadors and our entire community are builders — and by this, we don’t just mean developers looking to create secret contracts.

We are supported by authors, businesspeople, educators, students, designers and artists who believe in the powerful vision of a more decentralized future. Enigma Ambassadors are the individuals who are most dedicated to this vision.

We are always looking for Ambassadors who can help us tell our story to the entire world. Enigma’s biggest priority as we build our protocol is becoming a truly global project. If you believe you would be a good fit for the Enigma Ambassador program — if you believe that you have something to offer to help us build a more sustainable and decentralized world — please apply today. We are accepting new Ambassadors every week, and we’d love to hear your story.

Incidentally, we are also growing our full time team! The Enigma team has now grown to over fifteen employees, and we’re still hiring all over the world. If you’re interested in coming aboard at an extremely exciting time in our development, please fill out an application form here. We are proud to have been recently selected as one of the “Most Desirable Companies to Work For” by Times of Israel. You can be a part of something special and help us really change the world.

Related to this, the Enigma team also spoke at a number of meetups and conferences in the past months. These included a token-curated registry meetup in San Francisco, TechCrunch Blockchain Sessions, CPC Crypto Developers Conference, Distributed: Markets, and more. We love connecting with Ambassadors and other members of our communities at these conferences. If there’s conferences you think we should be attending or speaking at — especially ones you help organize — get in touch with our team!

So What’s Next?

While we are excited about our testnet release, there is still a lot of work to do as we move closer to first mainnet. We will provide regular updates on our progress over the coming weeks and months. Our ultimate goal is for secret contracts to become the new standard — and for decentralized applications to finally move from novelties to necessities. With your efforts combined with ours, we can move ever closer to this vision and really change the world.

We’ll also spend the rest of 2018 aggressively expanding our international presence — growing our Ambassadors, participating more in Asian communities (Korea, Japan, China, and more), and speaking at more meetups and conferences, such as the upcoming Voice of Blockchain conference in Chicago. While we likely can’t meet our entire community in person, we’ll certainly be trying!

Please continue to watch this blog (and subscribe!) to stay up to date on our development, partners, and global growth. We are committed to openness and transparency with our community, and our entire team is always available in Telegram and ready to talk with you. You can also follow along on our active and increasingly popular Twitter.

We’re also going to keep writing! Our team has already published a number of articles in the Enigma Solutions Series, exploring all the ways Enigma’s protocol can power new types of solutions for private voting, auctions, identity, credit, and more. We hope you’re reading — and if you’d like to contribute your own idea for an Enigma Solutions post, get in touch with us!

All of us at Enigma sincerely thank you for your continued support. We remain very grateful for your belief in our project, and we hope to continue to reward your faith. We’ll keep building — and now you can build with us too :)

Onwards and upwards,

The Enigma Team