Announcement

Secret Network Ecosystem Update: September 2020

Secret Network

October 9, 2020

Hello to the community! This past month represented a historic moment for Secret Network and its overall ecosystem. After years of research and development alongside community coordination, privacy-preserving “secret” smart contracts finally launched on mainnet! This successful upgrade means that Secret Network is the first “layer-1” blockchain to enable general-purpose private computation.

Read on for more about this milestone and many other developments from around the Secret ecosystem over the month of September, including updates from Binance, Keplr / Chainapsis, Stake or Die!, Secure Secrets, Whisper Node, Chain of Secrets, our awesome community committees, and more!

🖖🖖🖖 Mainnet Upgrade: Secret Contracts!

Why is this such an important development?

Everything that happens on a blockchain is public by default, including your data, your transactions, your identity, etc.
That means that all the data used in a smart contract is exposed to everyone.
For blockchain technology to achieve global adoption, users (including companies and other organizations) need control over how their data is used – they can’t just expose it to everyone.

This upgrade makes Secret Network the only blockchain running live smart contracts with encrypted inputs, outputs, and state.

Following this launch, our attention has turned to building scalable, privacy-first applications. Secret Network’s unique technology unlocks many important use cases in the fields of healthcare, finance, media, gaming, and more! We aim to drive global adoption of meaningful, decentralized technologies, i.e. bringing privacy solutions to the whole blockchain omniverse. That is why our community is building connections to Ethereum, Cosmos Hub, Terra, and other networks.

Binance Listing and Research Report

On the last day of September, Binance completed an on-exchange ENG/SCRT swap for their users and opened the first markets for Secret (SCRT). This support is critical for the global adoption of the network and its applications! This brings the total number of ENG tokens swapped for SCRT coins via the community swap to 56.7 million coins. You can see this progress on Puzzle.

via Puzzle.Report ~ 56.7 million ENG burnt for SCRT as of Friday, October 9

In addition, Binance published their first research report on Secret Network.

Some highlights:

Secret Network is an interoperable blockchain infrastructure that aims to enable computational privacy for general-purpose smart contracts.
Utilizing Trusted Execution Environments, nodes on the Secret Network can perform computations on encrypted data without having access to the raw data itself. Secret contracts are thus allowed to utilize encrypted inputs, outputs, and states for operations.
Secret Network is utilizing a Delegated Proof of Stake consensus algorithm mechanism based on Tendermint and the Cosmos SDK.
The SCRT token is the native utility token of the network, and is used for staking, delegation, governance, as well as all computational and transactional fees.

SCRT 2020: Our Vision for Universal Finance

Having been inspired by the ATOM 2021 vision outlined by Zaki Manian, we introduced our Secret Vision for Universal Finance, a.k.a. UniFi. One of the most important use cases in our ecosystem is addressing the many critical challenges of decentralized finance (such as front running and lack of privacy). Here is the initial GitHub repository that describes our plans, and below is a link to a blog post with additional information:

The Secret Network community is building applications to solve the problem(s) of DeFi by introducing more usable and sustainable products like Secret Tokens, Secret Markets, and Secret Staking Derivatives. Everything – from transactions, to lending, wrapped assets, stable coins, and exchanges – substantially benefits from privacy. Importantly, all of these products are interconnected, creating a universal economy for open finance. This means more accessible, interoperable and sustainable applications and organizations.

SecretWasm: How Secret Contracts Work

Having participated in the Cosmos ecosystem for the better part of a year, we were thrilled to share this detailed post about our collaboration with Confio, which is building and testing a smart contract module, named x/wasm or CosmWasm, for the Cosmos SDK. This enables developers to create multi-chain smart contracts!

Building in tandem with Confio, while helping to address challenges related to memory management, Enigma introduced the x/compute module for privacy-preserving Secret Contracts, written in the Rust programming language, based on CosmWasm, that can run across our network of validator nodes equipped with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).

New Guide for Staking Secrets

If you are holding SCRT coins, you may earn more SCRT by contributing to network security and stability! Staking is a more active form of “HODLing” that puts your Secrets to work, while letting you directly participate in governance of the network. This post will teach you how to get started, how to calculate your rewards, and even how to run your own secret node.

The above post answers the following questions:

How does staking work on Secret Network?
How much are the rewards for staking?
How can I stake my Secrets?
How can I participate in governance?
How do I change or remove my stake?
How can I run my own secret node?

Keplr Staking Dashboard – one great option for staking your Secrets!

Staking Rewards Calculator by Stake or Die!

In September, Stake or Die! (one of the many awesome Secret Network validators) launched their staking rewards calculator! Use this great tool to help visualize and calculate your Secret staking rewards.

Keplr Integration Update

In the August Ecosystem Update, we described how Chainapsis was funded by a community proposal to build secret contract support into Keplr (a great web wallet for storing your Secrets). Here’s the latest on their work!

“Our emphasis for this week has been to integrate transaction signing and interactions with Secret contracts. The first progress we made was with making sure Wasm smart contract with CosmWasm was integrated into Keplr. On that front, we’ve completed development and have tested out Wasm execution on Confio’s Coralnet with great success.

We are now developing features which allow Secret Contract execution, in addition to dealing with encryption/decryption of smart contract messages within Keplr and creating a user flow which is specific to Secret Network.”

Secret API by Chain of Secrets

Chain of Secrets recently introduced the Secret API, which supports querying the state of the network, submitting and voting on governance proposals, withdrawing staking rewards, querying and broadcasting transactions, and much more! Now their team is working on adding the latest secret contract queries and transactions, along with experimental SecretToken commands, to the Secret API.

This Secret API provides an interface with both REST and RPC endpoints, which Secret Agents may use to interact with the network. Chain of Secrets provides helpful examples with parameter settings and typical responses, and using the API is a great way to learn what you can do with Secret Network.

Secret Raffle

To help promote Keplr Wallet and broad adoption of Secret Network, we announced our first Secret Raffle, where ten lucky winners would receive 250 SCRT each! ENTRIES ARE NOW CLOSED. To be eligible, you had to like and retweet the announcement tweet, install Keplr (wallet.keplr.app), and create a Secret wallet address. We were delighted to see over 300 entries in just a few days!

Tutorial for using Keplr with Secret Network by Whisper Node

Decentralization Update from Secure Secrets

“With SGX requirements now being mandatory on mainnet, there has been a decrease from 46 validators to 34 active validators. This was an expected change as SGX hardware requirements are uniquely expensive, which is par for the course when pushing the boundaries of computational obfuscation. In addition, with Binance recently supporting a swap for many of its users, there will inevitably be a large influx of individuals staking on the network.”

Here is the public spreadsheet with all the calculations used in the below quantitative investigation performed with a snapshot from September 30.

total delegated SCRT increased by 50%; total active nodes decreased by 46%

Voting Power Breakdown

Currently, the top 6 out of 34 active validators (Quiet monkey mind, puzzle.report, Chain of Secrets, Mario, Staked, and Cashmaney) together own 54.6% of voting power on Secret Network. Previously the top 4 controlled over 50%, but now the top 6 control over 50%. This indicates a shift towards a more decentralized staking and governance system!

The above table shows a 7% decrease in control from the top 50% of the network, and a nearly 10.5% increase for the bottom 50% of the network! Our community should be proud of the progressive decentralization happening in the ecosystem.

Secret Website

September also saw a successful proposal to fund open-sourcing the official Secret Network website! Work is now in progress to create a long term home for essential resources related to Secret Network, its ecosystem, and its community.

We look forward to revealing much more in the month of October!

Secret Committees: Empowering Secret Agents

There are so many ways to get more involved in the Secret ecosystem and work alongside us developing projects and applications! We currently have five different committees working on projects related to development, infrastructure, education, awareness, and governance.

Development Committee

Our dev committee has invited various contributors to present what they are building. We heard from the creator of Emblem Vaults and someone developing a sealed-bid auction mechanism. Also, we are in the process of establishing standards like ERC-20 and ERC-721:

Another project involves rewarding GitHub contributions (merged pull requests) with off-chain reputation (using the SourceCred algorithm to calculate scores from GitHub data) and on-chain secret tokens. Check it out!

Infrastructure Committee

Having completed the initial objective, compiling this list of SGX-compatible hardware and software, the infrastructure committee is now scaling back to meetings every other week. There has been some discussion about a potential community infrastructure project, and Secret Foundation is excited to support this initiative by providing necessary resources.

Education Committee

This committee has effectively managed our content calendar, which is now public. You can see all the content being produced in this folder. Also, Staky has proposed the development of a platform to help developers learn how to build Secret Contracts and Secret Apps. Here is their off-chain community-spend proposal:

Awareness Committee

Recently, the awareness committee has been focused on analyzing weekly analytics reports, including data from our website, blog, forum, chat, Reddit and Twitter. Join our weekly meetings to learn more about how to contribute!

We also introduced “Secret Network Awareness Campaigns” (SNACs) to facilitate planning and execution of various initiatives related to sustainable growth, marketing, and community engagement.

Governance Committee

Our governance committee facilitated many important discussions about community-spend and parameter-change proposals, not to mention helping to coordinate our mainnet upgrade! One example of success would be this proposal to update the BlocksPerYear (from 6,311,520 to 5,303,798) to better align expected inflation with actual inflation. Read the full proposal in this forum thread:

We also have a new project group dedicated to creating useful analytics reports. Also, there has been discussion about forming a design / art committee to improve quality of visual content produced by our education committee. Let us know if you’re interested in getting involved or you have an idea for a project!

Conclusion

Thanks for reading this update! We will continue to build momentum, and we would be thrilled if you joined our community on Discord, Telegram, and the Secret Forum. Please don’t hesitate to share any ideas or questions. Our Secret Agents greatly appreciate your feedback!

Read the previous Secret Ecosystem Update:

To Infinities and Beyond 🛸🛸🛸

To discuss Secret Network and Secret Apps, visit our community channels:
Website | Forum | Twitter | Discord | Telegram