We’re now halfway through the year, and the Secret Network team has been hard at work executing on our 2024 development roadmap. In this post, we’ll cover the progress we’ve made so far, and give updated timelines for some of the remaining items.
The roadmap is divided into 3 sections:
- Confidential Computing Hub
- Network Infrastructure
- Community
Let’s dive in!
Confidential Computing Hub
The “Confidential Computing Hub” section of the roadmap focuses on the interoperability of Secret Network’s technology with other blockchains. The overall goal is for Secret to provide decentralized confidential computing (DeCC) to all of Web3. This section of the roadmap is divided into 3 subsections: Secret on EVM, EVM on Secret, and Constellation Infrastructure.
Secret on EVM
The “Secret on EVM” subsection focuses on providing Secret’s decentralized confidential computing tooling to EVM blockchains. We set out to develop and document various use-cases, so that developers on EVM chains can easily start using this technology without having to do a lot of preliminary research or development work of their own.
So far, the use-cases we’ve developed are:
- Random Number Generation (RNG)
- Key-Value Store
- Confidential Voting
- Sealed-Bid Auctions
- Confidential NFTs
- Encrypted File Storage (created by FiftyWei as part of our Grants program)
- Confidential Limit Orders (nearly finished)
We dropped the “Basic Set Operations” , “Confidential ERC-20” for now. We will also look into creating account abstraction primitives later this year..
In addition to developing and documenting these use-cases, we needed to provide a way for Secret Network to communicate with various EVM chains. When this roadmap was first published, we had one method of enabling this cross-chain communication, which was Axelar GMP. Not all EVM chains are integrated with Axelar though, and we didn’t want to be limited to relying on just one technology for all cross-chain interoperability.
Although not originally part of the roadmap, another technology became instrumental in allowing us to connect to other blockchains – SecretPath. Initially developed by Fortress Labs, SecretPath is a lightweight trustless message passing bridge. The Secret Network team adapted this technology and brought it to production, and are now using it to communicate with over 20 EVM blockchains. We’ve also been further developing it to be compatible with Solana, and expect to launch this in Q3.
These cross-chain communication technologies, along with the various confidential computing use-cases we’ve developed, come together to form Secret’s Confidential Computing Layer. Throughout the rest of 2024, we will continue integrating this product with new blockchains (including non-EVM chains) and developing new use-cases for it.
EVM on Secret
The “EVM on Secret” subsection focuses on integrating Ethereum technologies with Secret, in order to provide both a user-friendly and developer-friendly experience for those more familiar with the EVM ecosystem.
The “Bridge Migration” item relates to EVM asset availability within the Secret Network ecosystem. Secret used to rely on a custom multi-sig bridge for this, but we have replaced this with Axelar as Secret’s primary token bridging service.
While we have not done any dedicated work on Metamask Compatibility, it is currently available on multiple dApps in the ecosystem (Shade, Stashh, Satoshi’s Palace, Pampit.fun, AART Casino to name a few), and is becoming a de-facto standard.
The Ethereum RPC item was meant to add Ethereum RPC to Secret Network nodes. With upcoming EVM support, this now seems redundant. Similarly, Automatic Solidity to Rust porting was meant as an intermediate step before full EVM compatibility is ready. Automatic porting, even if done well, is usually messy and requires additional developer work before code can be run. Therefore, given our current estimate that EVM compatibility will be available in Q3-Q4 this year, we will most likely be dropping those from the roadmap. We are currently integrating an EVM into Secret Network as part of our partnership with Swisstronik.
Constellation Infrastructure
The “Constellation Infrastructure” subsection pertains to our Confidential Computing Constellation vision. The idea is to have multiple interconnected blockchains, each providing different types of DeCC solutions.
As part of this effort, we have onboarded two new partner app-chains, Swisstronik and Obi. We’re also in discussions with additional chains.
Our upcoming network upgrade will include Cosmos SDK 0.50, which will give us the opportunity to offer shared security to app chains in a seamless manner.
Network Infrastructure
The “Network Infrastructure” section of the roadmap relates to core blockchain development. It includes three subsections: Security, Scalability, and Decentralization.
Most of the time was spent on upgrading Secret Network to the latest version of Cosmos SDK.
This upgrade brings to Secret Network Cosmos SDK 0.50 and CometBFT 0.38, ABCI++ and others. Here are the key modules that were upgraded:
- Cosmos-sdk from v0.45.16 to v0.50.8
- Cometbft from v0.34.27 to v0.38.9
- ibc-apps from v4.1.1 to v8.1.0
- ibc-go from v4.6.0 to v8.1.0
This upgrade is important to bring Secret on a par with the latest developments in the Cosmos ecosystem, and will allow us to integrate advanced functionality like shared security, fee abstraction, optimistic execution, ABCI 2.0 for vote extensions, begin+end block automations, and more. The new IBC allows will allow integrations with Union, Andromeda, Octopus and others,
At the moment, the devnet has been released. We expect to upgrade the Testnet in 2-3 weeks from now, and then, after 3 more weeks of testing, to move forward to Mainnet upgrade.
We have also started looking into upgrading to a faster WASM engine, but we don’t have any concrete results yet.
DCAP attestation was fully implemented and release as part of 1.13 upgrade on May 23, 2024. DCAP (Data Center Attestation Primitives) is the new attestation process by Intel which is more decentralized than the previous EPID process. More importantly, DCAP attestation is the only available attestation for newer Intel processors, and implementing DCAP allows Secret validators to run all the latest generations of Xeon processors, improving performance and reducing costs.
MRENCLAVE feature has been implemented, and will be part of the 1.14 upgrade. MRENCLAVE is a way to verify that the code running inside the enclave is exactly the same code as was approved by the network upgrade proposal. Prior to MRENCLAVE, we were using MRSIGNER that allowed the enclave to run any code signed by Labs.
ORAM research was meant to address some of the potential side-channel attacks on SNIP-20 and other contracts. Although we haven’t implemented ORAM yet, in the meantime we funded an alternative solution as part of our Q2 grants cohort – Delayed Write Buffers (DWB). This is an elegant solution to remove the risk of storage access pattern attacks specifically on SNIP-20 tokens. We expect to upgrade SNIP-20 contracts with Delayed Write Buffers functionality in Q3 of this year. We will continue to explore ORAM as a future solution.
Merkle Proofs feature has been delayed. Originally, it was believed that Merkle Proof is required for MRENCLAVE implementation, but it appears that using Cosmos SDK 0.50 AnteHandlers provides a more succinct and elegant solution. We will be implementing Merkle Proof later in order to mitigate potential attacks involving invalid network stake.
Community
The “Community” section of the roadmap contains items that directly relate to user and developer quality of life improvements. It includes three subsections: Public Goods, Allocations and Tokenomics, and BD and Partnerships.
In Public Goods, we have delivered the following:
- Token creation interface – we have revived TokenGarden – a simple UI for anyone to create new SNIP-20 tokens. We also provided grant funding to a project which will make token creation and launching even easier.
- Consistent Assets Naming was discussed, and updated and simpler asset naming was suggested. Secret Tunnel was already updated with the new asset names, and other dApps will follow suit.
- Archive Node is now available through partnership with Mario validator
Master Permit (a way for the user to give a dApp access to all of their SNIP tokens), will be part of the upcoming SNIP-20 upgrade, together with Delayed Write Buffers.
On Allocation and Tokenomics, we have delivered:
- Revamped Grants Program (Q1 and Q2 cohorts granted, Q3 soon)
- Annual Delegations were performed, and Mid-term Delegation Update in the works
- We performed a Tokenomics Review with a 3rd-party consultant tknomics, starting an active and deep community discussions. We hope these discussions will lead to a balanced proposal for improved tokenomics.
In terms of business development, our activity focus shifted more towards infrastructure players that will help us enable working with applications. As part of our Confidential Computing Layer expansion, we announced partnerships with several EVM chains that we integrated with, including Optimism, Linea, Scroll, Metis, Moonbeam, Aurora, Lisk, Etherlink, and XDC. We will continue these efforts throughout the year, and already have some major announcements in the pipeline!
Additionally, we announced partnerships with Unstoppable Domains, Fairblock, Numia, and Cudos. We have also been putting together a “builders program”, which we intend to launch in Q3. We spent certain efforts on partnership with hardware wallets and payment processors, but didn’t reach concrete results.
Looking Ahead
Overall, we feel that the announced roadmap was executed in a satisfactory manner. The “Confidential Computing Hub” development pace actually exceeded our expectations. “Network Infrastructure” development priorities were somewhat reshuffled. Also, the execution took longer than originally planned, mainly due to the complexity of the Cosmos SDK upgrade. The SCRT Labs team will be gaining development velocity as more and more experience is gained by the new team members, and as new members are hired. Finally, the “Community” portion of the roadmap was also largely executed as planned, although tokenomics updates still need to be finalized.
With the first half of 2024 in the rearview mirror, we’re now working on the remaining roadmap items, and expect the second half of 2024 to bring some exciting developments. Look forward to new Confidential Computing Layer integrations with major blockchains, additional CCL use-cases developed, native EVM support, constellation chain launches, multiple network upgrades introducing new features and improved scalability, new dApp launches, new projects funded through our grants program, and more! All of these efforts will further our mission to bring Decentralized Confidential Computing to all of Web3.
Join in on the discussion on the Secret Network community channels!
