Each week, the Jumpstart Blockchain senior analysts review and recommend one blockchain project that has a potential to disrupt the respective industry. In this analysis and research, we thoroughly review the product, the vision, the team, and various parameters of success of a project.
This week’s blockchain project is Enigma, a platform that is designed to use by other blockchains to implement privacy and true scalability.
The Problem
Blockchains are a new and revolutionary technology that is still in its early stages. Two key challenges blockchains face today are privacy and scalability.
Privacy
Data protection and privacy is one of the major challenges for businesses. Data on the permissionless blockchains is public and is accessible by anyone, making storing sensitive data impossible. This not only restricts the number of applications for blockchains.
Scalability
Distributed apps and networks are not necessarily known for performance and scalability. Data on a blockchain is copied on each participating node and the data updates are slow depending on the complexity of the consensus algorithm and the size of the network. That makes computing on the blockchain is too slow and expensive. Storing and computing over very large amounts of data on the blockchain is not feasible.
The Solution
The promise of Enigma lies in its unique technology that protects privacy of data while still allowing for computation over that data.
Enigma’s protocol is based on innovative privacy technologies first described in 2015 in our cofounder’s MIT thesis. With Enigma, "smart contracts" become "secret contracts", where input data is kept hidden from nodes in the Enigma network that execute code. Without this functionality to protect sensitive data, blockchains and smart contracts are either useless or not truly decentralized. Enigma is the missing piece to a decentralized future.
Enigma converts smart contracts into secret contracts.
Secret Contracts
The Enigma network provides a permissionless peer-to-peer network that allows executing code (secret contracts) with strong correctness and privacy guarantees. The key difference between Enigma and other smart contract platform is that the data itself is concealed from the nodes that execute computations. This enables dApp developers to include sensitive data in their smart contracts, without moving off-chain to centralized (and less secure) systems.
