Enigma

Network for private computing https://enigma.co 

All societal and economic activity must strike a balance between a public and private life. Some activity must be private and some needs to be public. The first blockchain systems were designed to have anonymous users with all activity public. We are now building tools to enable confidential and private activities on public networks. These tools use a variety of cryptographic techniques to transform data without revealing the underlying data. Some of these tools are being integrated directly into ledgers like ring signatures on Monero, zk-SNARKS on z-cash, and mimblewimble coins through Grin and Beam. We expect privacy tools to continue to make their way into all major ledgers. But that is only part of the story. There are tools enabling smart activity to be private like Zether, Keep, Aztec Protocol, zkDAI and others. But we believe there is a bigger opportunity. An opportunity to offer a privacy layer for the decentralized web. This is the opportunity for which we think Enigma is poised to grasp.    

The Enigma protocol is a decentralized and distributed network of nodes around the world which, through the use of secret contracts, are able to compute data in a way that maintains confidentiality and integrity. Secret contracts ensure that the data is kept verifiably untampered and private from the beginning to the end of the process, including from the node performing the computational task. We think that even when ledgers and smart contracts integrate zero-knowledge techniques for transactions, there will still be a requirement to off-load heavy computation tasks in a private and verifiable way. We think secret contracts open up use cases that have been proposed for crypto-networks but never been possible before. Use cases in healthcare, corporate data sharing, and personal data marketplaces for example. Public open networks will ultimately be more useful than private closed neworks, but only if private activity can take place. Enigma is a critical piece of privacy infrastructure.

Overview