8 Blockchain Projects Enlist Early to Test Secret Enigma Contracts

In a sign of the broad applicability of that idea, as revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, eight diverse blockchain projects will be incorporating Enigma's protocol into their services when the contracts launch later this year.

These "Launch partners," said Enigma co-founder and CEO Guy Zyskind, are already building on the current version of the technology, called "Discovery," within the testnet, so when the protocol actually goes live, they'll be processing user's data without revealing it to any outside party.

The protocol ensures user data "Stays completely encrypted from the point of view of the network parties that are executing these secret contracts," said Zyskind, while remaining "Tamper proof" like a normal smart contract.

Not only does Enigma's protocol allow such data to be run through Colendi's algorithms in an encrypted form, it also avoids creating an Equifax-like honeypot for hackers to go after, he suggested.

While Ocean Protocol is creating "a decentralized ecosystem aimed at unlocking data for AI consumption," some datasets, particularly medical data, cannot be bought and sold unencrypted, said co-founder Don Gossen.

Another data marketplace launch partner is Datawallet, which aims to let users monetize data from applications, such as social media, by selling them to advertisers, for example.

Enigma also announced partnerships with Portal Network, which turns wallet and smart contract addresses on multiple blockchains into human-readable IDs; Eximchain, a supply chain solution based on Quorum; ReBloc, an ethereum-based real estate data marketplace; 2key, a second-layer network that aims to disrupt social networks; and Datacoup, a platform for monetizing personal data, which is transitioning to ethereum.

When the protocol is live, computers or "Nodes" on the network will be incentivized to perform secret contract operations with the native ENG tokens Enigma sold in its ICO. For those familiar with the Enigma white paper, which caused a minor sensation when it was published in 2015, Discovery represents an intermediate step to the fully fledged Enigma protocol.

In other words, the smart contracts perform operations on the data without ever having - or getting - to decrypt it, so this approach is considered especially secure.

The mainnet launch of Discovery will bring secret contracts to ethereum, but they'll be housed in what are called trusted execution environments, rather than functioning through SMPC. Zyskind said TEEs still provide excellent security because "Any input data that needs to go inside the computation, inside the execution, is being encrypted on the outside with a key that only exists inside the enclave."