Enigma Goes to ETHDenver!
By: Ainsley Sutherland
Tags: Hackathons, Data, Smart Contracts, Privacy, Ethereum

Enigma Goes to ETHDenver!

After a number of successful hackathons in 2019, Enigma is thrilled to be heading back to ETHDenver in February!

We had a wonderful experience at ETHDenver 2019 — so much so that we decided to return this year as Meta-level sponsors! With the recent launch of our networked testnet — our final major technical milestone before mainnet launches in 2020 — we are actively looking to get as many developers as possible hands-on with our protocol and building their own “secret”, privacy-preserving smart contracts.

Read on to learn more about Enigma, ETHDenver, and what you can build!

Details of Enigma’s Bounties:

Bounty #1: Best CryptoGame

Description: This award is going to a team who creates the best game utilizing secret contracts to enable private interactions (for any aspect of the gameplay).

Prize: 500 Dai

Bounty #2: General Purpose Reward

Description: This prize will be awarded to the team who builds the most interesting and creative project involving Enigma.

Prize: 500 Dai

Bounty #3: Best Salad Integration

Description: This prize will go to a team who develops the best integration of Salad, our non-custodial mixing service, into a wallet or dapp.

Prize: 1000 Dai

For each of these bounties, our main judging criteria will be usability, technicality and creativity. Members of SecretDAO will vote on the winners. We are looking for projects with potential to continue development as Enigma prepares to launch mainnet.

What’s Enigma?

Enigma is building a decentralized, open-source protocol that lets anyone perform computations on encrypted data, finally bringing privacy to smart contracts and public blockchains. First founded and researched at MIT in 2015, Enigma turns ordinary smart contracts into “secret contracts”, allowing developers to build thousands of new and valuable privacy-preserving solutions. Enigma’s mission is to improve the adoption and usability of decentralized technologies, for the benefit of all.

Blockchains are bad at privacy by design — and as a result, traditional smart contracts suffer from significant limitations. They cannot use data that needs to be kept confidential. Enigma is building the first scalable platform for decentralized applications that can utilize sensitive or private data as inputs. Secret contracts unlock the enormous potential of dApps and can revolutionize industries like finance, credit, gaming, machine learning, healthcare, and many others that depend on the use of sensitive data. They also help swing the balance of power over data back to the individual.

How does it work? Our protocol breaks up sensitive data and distributes it in encrypted form across “secret nodes” on the Enigma network. Nodes can then use this data to perform computations without seeing or exposing the raw data itself. As Enigma thus solves for scalability in addition to providing data privacy, we believe that the first decentralized applications with millions of users will be built on Enigma — and that Enigma is the critical missing piece to a decentralized future.

Can I get a quick technical overview?

We’ve actually released a complete “quickstart” guide to Enigma that you can reference now or during the hackathon, but we’ll summarize some of the important points below!

Enigma’s secret contracts are written in Rust. Secret contracts can compute over encrypted data and call functions in Ethereum smart contracts upon completion.

Network diagram of data flow in Enigma

EnigmaJS — the client library for interacting with Secret Contracts. Enables users to encrypt, decrypt, and submit “Tasks”: encrypted data payloads sent to Secret Contracts.

Secret Contracts — written in Rust, the contract is public and executes over encrypted data (Tasks) submitted by the user.

Please reference our Quickstart Guide, our full documentation, or our complete technical resource index for more great information.

What can I build at ETHDenver?

Given the essential nature of privacy for every type of application, there are many great opportunities to build with Enigma. For some great ideas, you can see what hackers built at ETHWaterloo, including privacy-preserving machine learning, “secret” NFTs, and, uh, faster wizards.

Here’s some other cool possibilities:

How can I meet the team at and before ETHDenver?

We’ll have six members of the full-time Enigma team attending ETHDenver and will have more information to share soon about events we’ll be attending and supporting in the Denver area before the hackathon. Stay tuned :)

One of the best parts of any hackathon is bringing our engineers together with developers. We’ll be doing an official workshop on Friday, February 14th. If you miss our official workshop, you can still stop by our table and meet Fred and Victor from our incredible engineering team to get a hands-on introduction to secret contracts. We will also have on-line support from Taariq and Laura, so keep an eye out for them in the Enigma Discord! (You might be able to pick up some great Enigma swag at our table…)

Before ETHDenver starts, our team will be active on the ETHDenver Discord as well as Enigma’s own channels. Our primary developer support channels are our Discord and our Developers Forum. Feel free to say hello to our team and ask any questions!

We also do regular Open Community Calls if you’d like to get more familiar with Enigma, our protocol, and our community. You can also ask any questions you have live on the call. Check out this recap from November’s call!

You can also find our team on our community Telegram and follow our news on our official Twitter and blog.