Hello to the community! What follows is a recap of important updates from the past month, including our progress towards enabling secret contracts. This post expands upon our regular community updates on the forum and includes ways for developers, validators, and others to get more involved with the project!
In June, the Enigma team achieved a significant milestone on the path to upgrading Secret Network. That means compiling and running a full node with wasmi inside SGX with encryption abilities. All basic functionality for executing CosmWasm contracts in a secure enclave is now implemented and continues to be tested! You can follow our progress by reviewing our development and product sprints on these GitHub project boards.
We now expect to have the first public testnet for secret contracts live in the month of July, coinciding with the start of the Secret Games. We will continue to share regular updates on development progress on the Secret Forum – and we have more info about this testnet later in this post. Keep reading for all the details!
Protocol Development: Enabling Secret Contracts
Since our community launched the Secret Network in February of this year, we have been focused on building the necessary components for private computation inside Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), namely Intel SGX. This work, led by Guy, Assaf, Tom, Reuven and Itzik, comprises many specific tasks, organized into these project milestones on GitHub:
- Milestone 1 — Integrating Smart Contracts into the Secret Network
- Milestone 2 — Executing CosmWasm Smart Contracts in SGX
- Milestone 3 — Adding Encryption for Secret Contracts Running in SGX
Lately, our team has been focused on WIP documentation for the cryptography elements of the secret protocol. This means encrypted inputs, outputs and state. Read more about Milestone 3 in this blog post by Enigma developer Assaf Morami.
Assaf Morami
What does this mean for developers?
Developers will soon have the ability to deploy secret contracts on the Secret Games testnet, maintained by Enigma. Our `compute` module for the Cosmos SDK gives the ability to run CosmWasm inside trusted execution environments (TEEs) maintained by node operators (secret nodes). As our dev team continues to test secret contract functionality, we are focused on improving our developer onboarding process and looking for help. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for Rust developers to build and deploy contracts. Please let us know if you have any feedback on our evolving documentation. This walkthrough is for an implementation of CosmWasm without any encryption features:
Contract Development Guide
What does this mean for node runners?
Building toward this new milestone has been exciting, and it means we’re one step closer to proposing secret contract functionality to the Secret Network. From that point forward, validators will need to use SGX-enabled hardware to participate as “secret nodes” in the network.
Secret Network
If you want to launch a node and become a mainnet validator today, here are the instructions:
We recently announced our incentivized testnet program, called the Secret Games, that will allow developers and testnet validators to receive Secret (SCRT) while helping us test secret contract functionality! If you’re interested in being notified when we share more details, please fill out this form:
Secret Games Interest Form
CosmWasm
Recently, we have been collaborating with the CosmWasm team, which is building a smart contracting platform for the Cosmos ecosystem. The Cosmos SDK, Tendermint and the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol are designed to enable scalable, interoperable application-specific blockchains. Enigma’s dev team is excited to contribute alongside Ethan Frey, Simon Warta, et al. They have invited Reuven to be a core contributor of the CosmWasm project, following some updates made in coordination with releasing version 0.9 of CosmWasm. Stay tuned for a detailed post on the x/compute module.
We’ve also written recently about how the Secret Network fits into the growing Cosmos ecosystem. Our privacy solutions can help many zones and other hubs with interoperable trusted computation services for any blockchain. Secret Hub facilitates adoption of application-specific networks, which are greater than the sum of their parts!
James Waugh
SafeTrace: Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing API
The Enigma team also continues to develop privacy-first applications that help solve real-world problems. Since our April Development Update on SafeTrace, we have been focused on connecting with app developers and other collaborators. We are excited to further develop SafeTrace and the Enigma Confidential Computing Platform (ECCP), including our work with IBM Cloud. For more info, you can review the documentation in our open source code base.
Going Forward
Overall, we’re thrilled to keep building toward the vision of privacy-preserving Secret Apps. We’re continuing research into various use cases, including secret voting, access control, and more! Please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team and the Secret Network community with any ideas or questions. You can find us on RocketChat, Discord, and the Secret Forum. If you’d like to get more involved in our developer community, please fill out this form:
Stay tuned for our weekly community updates and governance meetings. Our next open discussion is planned for Wednesday July 8 at 11:00am EDT / 3:00pm UTC. Here is the link to join and participate:
Thank you for supporting our mission to bring essential privacy solutions to the decentralized web — and to advance privacy as a public good! We are deeply grateful for your help.
Onwards and upwards,
The Enigma Team
To discuss Secret Network and join our community, visit our official channels:
Website | Forum | Twitter | Discord | Telegram
