In this post, we will talk about the future of Secret Network and share our updated Roadmap with the community.
Secret is going through exciting times – the recent changes in leadership are bringing new ideas and new ways of thinking, while retaining and improving on the vast amount of experience gathered by the team over the past years.
Secret is the longest-standing confidential smart contract blockchain, and as such has a huge potential to be the leader in Web3 confidentiality and privacy.
The roadmap below outlines our thoughts about what needs to be done in the coming months to achieve that goal.
As with all software roadmaps, this roadmap is not a “set in stone” promise, but rather a living document that will evolve and change with time according to new market conditions and technology development. It outlines our strategic thinking for the year to come.
The roadmap consists of three main motions:
- Confidential Computing Hub – connectivity between Secret and other ecosystems
- Network Infrastructure – all things related to the network itself
- Community – public goods, SCRT allocations, business development and more
Let’s roll up our sleeves and get down to the nitty gritty details of the roadmap.
Secret as Confidential Computing Hub for Web3
Confidentiality and data protection are becoming key topics in Web3. With the growing appetite for institutional adoption and evolving use cases for crypto, it becomes clear that confidentiality will be one of the key drivers for the next wave of adoption.
In early August, we announced Secret Ethereum, an initiative to offer our privacy solutions to the Ethereum ecosystem, with the goal of enabling multiple use cases to developers and end users.
A large part of our 2024 roadmap is dedicated to fulfilling this vision. The effort is divided into three parts:
- Offering Privacy as a Service on EVM
- Offering EVM-like user and developer experience on Secret
- Building up the Confidential Computing Constellation
Let’s discuss the planned deliverables in this area:
Secret on EVM
Our goal is to enable any EVM developer to quickly and easily build applications that use confidential computing, without the need to learn new technologies and without exposing the end user to additional blockchains.
Our latest update, version 1.11, harnesses the power of Axelar to facilitate General Message Passing between networks. This breakthrough enables a Solidity contract to seamlessly interact with a Secret contract, and vice versa. With this innovative technology at our disposal, we are embarking on the development of an SDK. This SDK will provide developers with a collection of pre-built components they can effortlessly integrate into their applications. We will initially focus on fundamental functionalities and progressively expand to encompass more advanced use cases such as voting, sealed-bid auctions, and more.
As we progress, we may also expand to other ecosystems besides EVM.
EVM on Secret
In addition to providing access to Secret’s confidential computation to Ethereum, we want to offer easier onboarding of Ethereum users to native confidentiality apps on Secret and companion networks. This effort has already been started by SCRT Labs and developers within the community, especially around the user experience. Shade Protocol, a leading privacy-preserving DeFi application suite built on Secret Network, recently completed work on their native MetaMask integration, which enables Ethereum users to bridge into Secret and start using Shade Protocol with nothing but ETH and a MetaMask wallet. Other examples include MetaMask Snaps built by Leap and Mystic Labs, which enable MetaMask users to interact with many different Cosmos-based blockchains, including Secret.
We are also considering adding Ethereum RPC interfaces to Secret nodes, making Secret “look like” an EVM blockchain. That would enable the use of all kinds of EVM-compatible tools on Secret.
Following the user experience, we want to address developer experience as well. There are two directions we want to research:
- Enabling automated porting of Solidity code to CosmWasm contracts, similar to what the Solang project is doing for Solana. This task will require further evaluation
- Running native EVM code on SGX. This may be best achieved by partnering with an EVM project as part of the Confidential Computing Constellation.
Which brings us to Confidential Computing Constellation vision.
Confidential Computing Constellation
The vision of the Constellation, as announced in September, calls for combining several confidential computing technologies, as well as app chains that will run as L1.5 or L2s on Secret Network.
To enable that, we will need to add some Replicated Security capabilities to Secret. IBC Consumer-Provider security module is a good candidate for this. Later into 2024, we will research more sophisticated shared security models, such as Mesh Security or Alliance.
We also plan on onboarding app chains during the year, and will continue to seek out additional confidential computing technologies to join the Constellation.
Network Infrastructure
A solid foundation is of paramount importance for building great ecosystems. Therefore we will be continuing to invest in strengthening the core network infrastructure of Secret.
Our efforts can be roughly divided into three core areas, coinciding with the famous Blockchain Trilemma: Security, Scalability and Decentralization.
Of course, a discerning reader will notice that some of the items serve more than one area, but we keep the division for simplicity of presentation. Most of the features below have already been discussed and presented to the community in earlier roadmap releases such as the Core Development Roadmap.
Security
Here’s the list of planned developments increasing security:
- Q1, 2024: Merkle Proofs – protect against modified state replay attack
- Q3-Q4: Improved SNIP-25 privacy through ORAM or another solution to improve Transactional Privacy on Secret
- Q4, 2024: Streamlined seed rotation – automating seed rotation for every upgrade
We also plan to address Threshold Encryption (MPC addition to Secret for either seed generation or private key sharing), would likely get there early 2025.
Scalability
- Q2, 2024: Upgrading IBC to 7.3. This will allow a host of features on Secret, and will let us keep up with the wider Cosmos ecosystem technology
- Q3-Q4, 2024: Researching more scalability avenues by using a better SGX framework (Gramine or alternative), and a faster Wasm engineLate 2024: Concurrent execution (to be able to scale performance even further, it is not enough to execute each individual transaction faster, but also to execute transactions concurrently. On average, 90% of the transactions in a block do not depend on any other – so our goal is to scale the execution engine to be able to parallelize transactions as well) is another idea that we will be exploring
Decentralization
- Q1, 2024: Migration from MRSIGNER to MRENCLAVE (described here in detail) Q2, 2024: DCAP Attestation – support Data Center Attestation Primitives to allow support for newer machines, improving both decentralization (more people able to run nodes) and scalability
Community Roadmap
Over the years, Secret has built a passionate and active community of developers, validators, traders and users. We feel that part of our job is to support the community by funding projects, creating public goods and bringing more players into the ecosystem.
This part of the roadmap will be jointly executed by SCRT Labs and Secret Network Foundation.
As before, we divide this part of the Roadmap into three parts – Public Goods, Allocations and Tokenomics and BD and Partnerships.
Public Goods
Q1, 2024: We will start working to upgrade sSCRT to a more advanced SNIP-25 standard. We will also work to build tools for creating new tokens and easy creation of Master Permits.
Q2-Q3, 2024:
- Addressing the need for Archive Nodes on the network, keeping the network history from genesis
- Making Validators’ lives easier by improving the node installation, operation and upgrade processes.
- Investing in user-facing documentation, developing easy-to-use guides for key user journeys on Secret Network, especially targeting newbies. Examples: how to bridge assets into Secret, how to trade, how to stay confidential, etc.
- Consistent asset naming – we believe the current asset naming nomenclature may be confusing (think saUSDC, sUSDC and USDC). We will drive ecosystem cooperation to improve this.
Allocation and Tokenomics
We will soon be announcing a new SCRT Labs Delegation Review. Our goal is to make the process well-structured and to repeat it every 12 months, with a minor review mid-year.We will also be announcing a renewed Grants program.
We also plan to address the network Tokenomics in Q1 2024. There were a lot of conversations on this topic in the community (for example, the recent proposal here), and we agree that a review is really required.
BD and Partnerships
In the coming months, we will dedicate our efforts to both expanding our network of partners outside the Secret ecosystem and enhancing our business development strategies. Our focus for partner acquisition will include the following areas:
- Payment Processors – enabling payment for goods and services in SCRT and possible sSCRT
- Dapp developers in various verticals who will benefit from our Confidential Computing solutions, both natively on Secret and on other ecosystems using our SDK.
- We will also be working on integrating Secret Network into leading DeFi data hubs, including a DEXScreener, TokenTerminal, and more
In addition, we are currently working on a potential partnership with a hardware wallet company. We will share more details as they become available.
Conclusion
This Roadmap will be guiding our efforts in the coming year. When building it and going through internal discussions, one of the words that was heard often was “ambitious”.
We believe that “ambitious” is good – we have to aim high and take calculated risks in order to achieve greatness. As a team, both SCRT Labs and Secret Network Foundation are aligned on all these goals and we are excited about the future!
Onwards and Upwards
