Development

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Developer activity (from Coinlib.io)

This initial effort focuses on creating certain building blocks for secret contract development. This should result in several open-sourced repos that feature sample secret contracts (written in Rust!) and a simple client-side UI (using Enigma-JS).

Bounty Guidelines

Bounty submissions should contain well-documented code that can be followed along easily by another developer.

These bounties will become part of Enigma’s educational resources moving forward, and they’ll be available to future developers as examples, inspiration, and starting points.

Complete the application process before starting work — the Enigma team will be reviewing pre-submission materials and initially selecting just one applicant at a time for each bounty.

Current Bounties

INow Enigma is working on these particular applications:

Check out the issues, and if one of these is interesting to you, follow the instructions to complete a pre-submission application, and you will hear from Enigma as soon as possible.

Funding for each bounty varies based on complexity — from $400-$600 in this round. Enigma will be managing these bounties with Gitcoin. The first bounty (secret access-control) has already been posted to Gitcoin here.

The Testnet Developer Release of Enigma’s Discovery network is announced. This considerable milestone clears the way for its partners and collaborators to quickly begin building secret contracts that will power their applications and solutions. Contracts built now will be able to be immediately deployed once Enigma is live on Ethereum mainnet — helping to provide immediate usage for the Enigma network.

This developer testnet finally enables privacy for general computations, enabling dApp developers to create significantly meaningful and secure applications

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 of 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. That means that secret contracts can have their 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.

New Guides, Walkthroughs, and Documentation!

To support the growth of Enigma’s network and ecosystem, its team is emphasizing usability and reliable documentation for developers. Alongside the release of the developer testnet, new content to the Protocol page on the Enigma blog, as well as brand-new documentation for Discovery were published.

Discovery Documentation

Visit https://enigma.co/discovery-documentation/ to see the full documentation for Discovery and get started!

What’s Next?

For developers

With this testnet developer release comes new opportunities for developers in the Enigma ecosystem. Going forward, Enigma will be much more active in hackathons (both in-person and online) as well as developer grant programs. The first upcoming initiative will be the introduction of Gitcoin bounties to create sample libraries (such as secret voting, secret auctions, secret data comparison, etc.) that other developers can use as building blocks. Enigma will also be developing a more involved accelerator program for longer-term projects.

For node runners

Now that secret contract developers have what they need to be successful, the attention now entirely turns to deploying the networked Discovery testnet on Ethereum, and with that launch, the beginning of the Genesis Game. If you are unfamiliar, this is the process by which genesis nodes (the first nodes supporting the Enigma network) will be selected.

The next communications around the Genesis Game will cover token economics, timelines for token snapshots and testnet token distributions, and other critical details for those interested in operating genesis nodes.

For the community

Enigma is looking forward to a number of exciting developer-focused conferences coming up in the very near future. Soon some of the upcoming events will be announcing where Enigma team will be speaking and leading workshops.