We have achieved our second major milestone (out of three) on the path to secret contracts! Plus: Secret Zone and Secret Apps.Hello to the community! What follows is a recap of important updates from the past month, as well as an announcement regarding our newest development milestone. This post expands upon our usual weekly updates on the developers forum and includes ways for developers, validators, and community members to get more involved with the project!Last month was busy and exciting for the Enigma dev team! Most importantly, we reached milestone 2 of 3 on the path to enabling secret contracts, which means compiling and running a full node with wasmi inside SGX. All basic functionality for executing CosmWasm contracts in a secure enclave is now implemented and tested! You can follow our progress by looking at our GitHub project boards for each dev sprint. We’ve also made progress on the SafeTrace API for privacy-preserving contact tracing, and we’re currently participating in the Cosmos Game of Zones. Keep reading for all the details!SafeTrace: Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing APIFollowing our announcement of the SafeTrace project in March, we built an MVP demo and front-end integration, joined the TCN Coalition, and hosted a webinar with Outlier Ventures to explore SafeTrace’s capabiilities. Outlier also presented their work on APEX, a collaborative analytics product built on the Enigma Discovery network. The goal is to leverage our expertise and create something useful (and privacy-preserving!) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For more info, you can read our full update on SafeTrace.SafeTrace: April 2020 Development UpdateCosmos Game of ZonesRecently, we have been gearing up for the Game of Zones, a series of adversarial testnet challenges designed to prepare the Cosmos ecosystem for the upcoming launch of the IBC module. Our dev team has created an IBC zone, which relayers will use to interact with our “Secret Zone.” Learn more about how the Enigma blockchain fits into the Cosmos ecosystem here:Secret Zone: Making Privacy One With the CosmosProtocol Development: Enabling Secret ContractsSince deploying the Enigma blockchain 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 and Reuven, comprises many specific tasks, organized into these project milestones on GitHub:Milestone 1 — Integrating Smart Contracts into the Enigma Blockchain (complete!)Milestone 2 — Executing CosmWasm Smart Contracts in SGX (complete!)Milestone 3 — Adding Encryption for Secret Contracts Running in SGXAchieving milestone 2 required integrating an internal runtime (wasmi) inside the SGX enclave. We also fixed some CosmWasm issues along the way. We anticipated this would be challenging, and it turned out to be even more so, given the original runtime that comes with CosmWasm (Wasmer) is incompatible with SGX. This, along with defining clear boundaries between code that lives outside the enclave (untrusted code) and inside the enclave (trusted code) meant that we needed to surgically remove Wasmer from CosmWasm internals and develop our own VM interface that interconnects smart contract executions on our blockchain with the new enclave-enabled wasmi runtime.Read more about our design approach:Secret Contracts on Enigma Blockchain(Dev discussion/Issue) WASM implementationWhat does this mean for developers?As of now, developers have the ability to deploy smart contracts (though not yet secret contracts) on the Enigma blockchain testnet. The compute module gives the ability to run the CosmWasm state machine inside trusted execution environments maintained by node operators. As our dev team continues to make progress towards enabling secret contracts, we are focused on improving our developer onboarding process (and looking for help). Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for Rust developers to build and deploy contracts on the Enigma testnet. Please let us know if you have any feedback on our current documentation:Enigma Blockchain Contracts Guide: initial walkthrough for working with the cosmwasm-based smart contracts on the Secret Networkenigmampc/enigma-blockchain-contracts-guideLearn more and help us with testing by sharing feedback here on the forum:Developer Walkthrough Update -- Testers wanted!What does this mean for node runners?Achieving this new milestone has been exciting, and it means we’re one step closer to proposing secret contract functionality to the mainnet blockchain. From that point forward, validators would need to use SGX-enabled hardware to participate as “secret nodes” in the network. If you want to launch an SGX node and become a validator, here are the instructions:How to install SGXHow to run a full nodeHow to be a validatorAs mentioned previously, we are currently exploring an incentivized testnet that will allow testnet validators to receive Secret (SCRT) while helping us test out secret contract functionality! If you’re interested in being notified when we’re able to share more details, please fill out this form:Secret Games Interest FormOur Next MilestoneRead more on GitHub: CosmWasm Inside SGX With Encryptionenigmampc/EnigmaBlockchainSummaryOverall, we’re thrilled to keep building toward the vision of Secret Apps. We’re continuing research into various use cases, including coin mixers, access control, secret voting and more! Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any ideas or questions. You can find our team and community on Discord and the developers forum.Stay tuned for our weekly community updates and Governance Working Group discussions. Our next call is planned for this Friday at 12:00pm EDT. We’ll share the link on Discord and on the community-hosted RocketChat.As always, thank you for being a part of our mission to bring essential privacy solutions to the blockchain space — and to make privacy a public good! We are deeply grateful for your support.Onwards and upwards,— The Enigma Teamhttps://medium.com/media/87707c63981b1640339d9bad188c32f9/hrefTo discuss the Enigma protocol or receive technical support:Forum | Discord | TwitterEnigma Development Update: April 2020 was originally published in Enigma on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
