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As we are at the midpoint of 2025, we continue to drive innovation in privacy-preserving blockchain technology. Our core mission remains clear: to develop and enhance Secret Network as the leading platform for confidential computing. This mid-year update demonstrates our execution across two critical workstreams that are positioning us at the forefront of the industry - Secret Network and SecretAI.
Strategic Focus: Beyond Traditional Blockchain
Our dual focus on Secret Network infrastructure and SecretAI/SecretVM expansion reflects a calculated strategy to leverage our TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) expertise into entirely new markets.
Our SecretAI offering provides confidential and trustless AI capabilities to developers building AI-powered services. We offer a viable privacy-preserving alternatives to incumbents such as OpenAI or Anthropic.
Our SecretVM offering allows anyone to run arbitrary workloads in a confidential and verifiable manner. With SecretVM, any application becomes, in a way, a smart contract, its code becoming law. This isn't just technical progress—it's a paradigm shift that expands blockchain's inherent trustless execution beyond traditional use cases.
Secret Network Upgrades
Our backbone - Secret Network = has undergone significant hardening during H1 2025, reinforcing our position.
Overview
Let’s have a look at the roadmap slide originally published on Jan 6, 2025, and show what was achieved, which items were delayed, and which are currently in the works.
As can be seen, most of the roadmap items were executed as planned, and a few were delayed. Let’s dive in:
MRENCLAVE Security Evolution
We successfully completed two critical MRENCLAVE upgrades, addressing complex security challenges that few teams have the expertise to tackle:
Initial MRENCLAVE sealing implementation (January release)
Advanced MRENCLAVE upgrade (February rollout)
These upgrades weren't routine maintenance—they required deep cryptographic expertise and careful coordination to maintain network stability while enhancing security. Our detailed technical breakdown demonstrates the sophisticated problem-solving required.
SNIP-250: Next-Generation Token Standard
The SNIP-250 token standard represents a major leap forward in privacy and user experience:
Delayed Write Buffers: Enhanced privacy through improved obfuscation of the transaction graph
SNIP Notifications: Better scalability for high-volume applications - the wallets don’t need to poll the blockchain for events, but subscribe to notifications
Blanket Permits: Streamlined user interactions without compromising security
The new contract code, as well as the upgrade routines, were developed by Supdoggie and Darwinzero with support from SCRT Labs Grants program, and were extensively tested by the Labs team before the actual upgrade.
Overall, 41 contracts were upgraded, including sUSDC, sUSDC.noble and sSCRT, and millions of dollars of value was moved to better and safer contracts
More information is available in a dedicated Twitter thread here.
Cron Module Integration
One of the roadmap items was integrating the Cron module developed by Neutron to Secret Network. Appearing initially as a relatively simple task, successfully integrating the Cron module required overcoming unique challenges that don't exist on standard Cosmos chains. Our privacy features create technical complexity that demanded custom solutions across five different repositories:
With the Cron module integrated, it will be possible to use governance vote to schedule certain tasks like running arbitrage bots, etc.
IBC Wrapping UX
Secret Dashboard was extended by adding batch wrapping/unwrapping of all tokens present in the user’s wallet in just a couple of clicks. Now, instead of going token-by-token and tediously executing multiple transactions, the user can execute just one batch transaction and wrap or unwrap multiple tokens at once,
The new interface can be experienced here: https://dash.scrt.network/wrap
Gramine and Minimum Hardware Requirements
Working in a changing environment requires making tough prioritization decisions. We deliberately shifted resources from Gramine PoC research to SecretAI/SecretVM development—a decision prioritizing practicality and new features.
Why This Was the Right Call:
Gramine complexity: High technical risk
Performance vs. capabilities: Current Secret Network performance isn't the bottleneck at the moment —new capabilities are the opportunity
Market timing: SecretAI/SecretVM positions us in rapidly growing confidential computing markets
Competitive advantage: These innovations put us at the industry forefront rather than incremental improvements
In the beginning of the year, we were also planning to research minimal hardware requirements. While some initial research has been done, the results were not entirely conclusive. We'll revisit this later this year, through active discussions with the community and SNF.
SecretAI & SecretVM: Taking TEEs Off-chain
While strengthening our blockchain foundation, we've simultaneously built entirely new product categories that leverage our TEE expertise.
Rapid Market Entry
Since January's SecretAI LLM inference launch, we've moved from concept to production deployments. Partners including earth.network and Arweave have already built products on our platform, along with several AI agents—proving real-world demand for confidential AI.
Overview
Most of the items present on the original roadmap were executed as planned, and many new items were added to the deliverables.
Our focus was mostly on infrastructure, functionality and developer experience, and less priority was given to the decentralization aspects of the solution (i.e. offering 3rd parties to provide hardware on our compute marketplace).
Below is the slide from the original SecretAI roadmap published on Jan 14, with marks showing what was achieved in the past 6 months, what’s still in the works and which items were delayed.
Developer-First Platform
During the first half of the year, we have delivered multiple components of the SecretAI and SecretVM system, and we are actively developing it:
SecretAI and SecretVM Developer Portal (secretai.scrtlabs.com)
Fully repeatable build of the SecretVM Artifacts, based on Yocto: (github)
On-chain Key Management System (github)
Additional tools and components (github)
Advanced Developer Experience
While developing the SecretAI portal, we are putting a lot of emphasis on developer experience, with the goal of making it easy for any developer to deploy their workloads in a confidential and verifiable manner:
Github Integration (video) - allow developers to deploy their workloads from Github
Secretvm-cli - a command line interface for interacting with the Developer Portal (video, github)
Automatic creation of Github workflows for Workload Verifiability - making it simple for developers to make their workloads fully verifiable through Github tags and automations
Teams feature, allowing developers to share access to machines, allowing devs to collaborate on creating, configuring and managing the VMs.
Automatic addition of SSL security to arbitrary workloads (video)
AI-powered dockerization of arbitrary workloads
Verifiable Message Signing - a cryptographic scheme to allow the SecretVM sign arbitrary messages proving their provenance (docs)
Additional AI Models
Currently SecretAI supports both text-generation models and Vision models. We are planning to also introduce image generation models, and we are working with partners on integrating custom healthcare models as well.
Technology Partnerships
Our partnership momentum demonstrates market validation. Working in close cooperation with SNF, we were able to secure and announce the following partnerships:
Autonomys - deploying AI agents in SecretVM (x post)
Fetch.ai - deploying AI agents in SecretVM (x post), working on additional features
Arweave - integration of Arweave Data Storage and SecretVM (x post)
Othentic - deploying MCP servers in SecretVM (x post)
Solidus AI Tech - integrating SecretAI into AITech’s AI Marketplace (x post)
Quex - Implementing a Proof-of-Humanhood using SecretVM (x post)
Additional partnerships are in the works, positioning SecretAI as a growth engine for the entire Secret ecosystem and the wider Web3 ecosystem.
Looking Forward
In the first half of 2025, we've strengthened our core blockchain infrastructure while building entirely new product categories.
The second half of 2025 will build on this momentum, with potential return to Gramine research contingent on SecretAI/SecretVM adoption and community input. Our adaptive approach ensures resources flow toward maximum impact opportunities. We will also continue investing in the security of the network, implementing Seed Rotation and other valuable features.
Also, following the successful upgrade of SNIP-20 contracts, we plan to allow contract upgradeability to be governed by the community rather than solely controlled by the contract owner. The new functionality will be released later this year, and will make contract upgrades require community approval, and the SNIP tokens currently controlled by SCRT Labs will be transferred to community control.
Bottom Line
We shipped multiple deliveries in the first half of 2025, successfully executing on most of the planned roadmap items.
SecretNetwork received much awaited security and decentralization upgrades, and our SecretAI portal is rapidly adding new functionality and offering a great set of features.
We will continue to tirelessly work on improving our blockchain infrastructure and our off-chain private and verifiable computation offerings.