Enigma Development Update — March 2020Progress on “secret contract” integration, wallet and governance updates, and SafeTrace: privacy-preserving contact tracing.Hello to the Enigma community! What follows is a recap of important development updates from the past month. For those who have been following our weekly updates on the developers forum, much of this progress may look familiar — but there’s some new information as well!As you may know, the Enigma team and community recently launched a mainnet blockchain using the Cosmos SDK. Since then, our development team has made significant progress toward integrating “secret contract” functionality with the Enigma network, which will allow smart contracts to use private and sensitive data as inputs. We’re excited to see things moving forward at a fast pace!The Big Dipper | Cosmos Block Explorer by ForboleJoining the Cosmos ecosystem has been a great opportunity to collaborate with innovative projects like CosmWasm and to participate in initiatives like IBC. This technical direction has also allowed us to focus on what we do best — building privacy solutions — and work towards our ultimate vision: bringing privacy to every blockchain.Read on for more updates on our development work, products, and more!Enigma + CosmWasmWarning: somewhat technical :)After launching a testnet with a built-in smart contract module, our dev team has been focused on compiling CosmWasm to SGX. This process has definitely been challenging. CosmWasm uses wasmer.io which is a JIT compiler, but SGX doesn’t support writing machine code to RWX memory and invoking it from there. We are shifting towards adding wasmi as a VM backend in CosmWasm. The wasm interpreter is enclave friendly, but CosmWasm is tightly integrated with Wasmer. Read more in this dev forum post.(Dev discussion/Issue) WASM implementationAssaf and Tom successfully executed wasmi inside an SGX enclave, and they managed to invoke Rust userspace functions in Wasm code (within the enclave). Now, we are making strides toward importing wasmi / SGX into CosmWasm. Reuven has made significant progress toward replacing the wasmer runtime of the compute module with a wasmi runtime running inside an SGX enclave. This pull request includes the details.We are also deploying smart contracts on the Enigma Testnet to better understand the developer experience of CosmWasm. Our product team is working on a guide for developers about how to use our compute module. We are looking at how it compares to developer experience of the Enigma discovery testnet and Ethereum. More info can be found here.lauraweindorf/enigma-dev-xSalad UpdateSince presenting at ETHBerlin last year, we have been focused on the usability challenges of mixers. Enigma’s team has been developing Salad, an open-source transactional privacy solution. As we move towards enabling secret contracts on Enigma, our approach to Salad is evolving. First, Salad will focus on mixing native assets like SCRT. Then we plan to explore interoperability with Cosmos networks, Ethereum, and other blockchains.Our full Salad development update can be found here.Salad: March 2020 Development UpdateMathWalletThanks and congratulations to MathWallet for completing a mobile wallet integration for Enigma! It’s really exciting to see participants in the Enigma community making such valuable contributions. They have also enabled staking tools!Check out their work with the links below and come talk to our community if you need any help getting set up!Enigma APP Wallet User Guide - MathWalletEnigma MathWallet Extension Tutorial - MathWalletSafeTrace: Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing for COVID-19As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact global society, we have been developing a platform called SafeTrace, which enables privacy-preserving contact tracing. This could help fight the virus by informing healthcare professionals, government officials and citizens around the world. Users will share location and infection status without compromising the privacy of that sensitive data. Check out what we’re building and learn how to get involved.enigmampc/SafeTraceSafeTrace: Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing for COVID-19We hope that all of you and your families are staying healthy and safe! We are sending love and well-wishes to everyone during these crazy times ❤️GovernanceOne major result of the move to launch an independent Enigma blockchain is the introduction of on-chain governance. Moving forward, the Enigma development team (and any other contributors) must make changes to the protocol using various kinds of proposals, which are voted on and approved by network validators.One of the recent proposals to pass on the network was a community fee parameter change. This dramatically increased the amount of SCRT being funded into the community pool, which can be used to fund community-driven initiatives for ecosystem expansion and improvement. We have spent a good amount of time discussing ways the pool can be used, and it contains roughly 250,000 SCRT at the time of this post. Let us know your ideas by replying in this forum thread.Community Pool SpendingIf you’re interested in contributing to or learning more about Enigma governance, be sure to join our weekly Governance Working Group calls every Friday at 2pm ET! Some of these meetings will be held using Mozilla Hubs in a virtual room aptly named the “Chamber of Secrets.” To get alerted about the calls, make sure you’re in the official Enigma Discord.This is just a brief overview of all the initiatives going on in the Enigma ecosystem. With many more updates to come — including our participation in Game of Zones and our work in COVID-19 hackathons — be sure to stay tuned to our official channels like this blog and our Twitter. In addition, you can:Join our team and community on the Enigma Developers Forum to discuss governance proposals, technical progress, product ideas, and more.Join our official Enigma Discord, talk with our team and community, and get your ideas heard and questions answered.We’re always looking for more ways to increase transparency around our development work and to better involve the broad Enigma community in governance of the Enigma network. As always, our team is deeply thankful for your support. We will continue to work alongside you on our mission to bring much-needed privacy solutions to the world.Onwards and upwards,— The Enigma Teamhttps://medium.com/media/87707c63981b1640339d9bad188c32f9/hrefTo discuss the Enigma protocol or receive technical support:Forum | Discord | TwitterEnigma Development Update — March 2020 was originally published in Enigma on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
