What is Enigma?
At Enigma, we believe in building a more decentralized future.
Our project was created by a team of MIT graduates and researchers, based on the research work laid out in the Enigma whitepaper, which has been downloaded over 100,000 times. The Enigma protocol is a second-layer, off-chain network that aims to solve the two biggest problems for blockchains: scalability and privacy. By enabling secure, decentralized data computation and exchange, Enigma allows blockchains to truly fulfill their powerful promise.
TRUE DECENTRALIZATION
Centralized systems are flawed - due to their structure, they can lead to misaligned incentives, corruption, and security vulnerabilities. Blockchains can help solve these issues, but they suffer from two major flaws of their own: scalability and privacy. Current computing capacity on blockchain is slow and expensive. In addition, sensitive data cannot be stored on-chain. As a result, most data must be stored off-chain in centralized databases. Enigma’s goal is to enable truly decentralized applications that do not share the vulnerabilities of centralized apps.
SECRET CONTRACTS
The promise of Enigma lies in its unique technology that protects privacy of data while still allowing for computation. Nodes in the Enigma network do not see the data they compute over, yet they can publicly prove that they run a computation correctly. This opens the door for a new type of Smart Contracts – dubbed Secret Contracts, where the underlying data processed in the contract remains encrypted at all times.
MANY APPLICATIONS
While many industries could be impacted by the Enigma protocol - including finance, health, identity, and credit - the first major application for the Enigma protocol is our decentralized, open, secure data marketplace. Truly decentralized applications cannot use centralized data sources, and no centralized authority should own and control the data.
Lets see where it goes.
