This post is co-authored by the Enigma and Chainlink teams.

Today the Enigma and Chainlink teams are happy to announce a new collaboration, focusing on the integration of our protocols to enable powerful new use cases for secret smart contracts. Below we outline some of the near-term and long-term opportunities afforded to developers by harnessing and combining the benefits of both protocols.

As projects, Enigma and Chainlink share many commonalities, including strong technical teams, focuses around solving privacy and scalability, and a collaborative mindset. By enabling connection between the two networks, novel solutions can emerge to some of the biggest problems facing the blockchain space, particularly privacy, scalability, and external connection. This will open up new product offerings in areas like decentralized finance (DeFi), as well as solutions for traditional industries, such as in credit, healthcare, machine learning, global trade, and many more.

To date, Enigma and Chainlink are already working together as members of larger industry-wide initiatives and alliances. Both projects are contributors to the Trusted Compute Framework (TCF) working group inside the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. In addition, both Enigma and Chainlink are recognized as “best-in-class” protocols within Outlier Ventures’ Convergence Stack, a collection of open-source technologies that promise to revolutionize the way data is used, consumed, and protected. This collaboration will allow us to expand upon these ongoing efforts and create new value for both ecosystems and communities.

Areas of Collaboration

As mentioned, integrating Enigma’s and Chainlink’s protocols can have both near-term and longer-term benefits for developers and users. In the short term, we are exploring how Chainlink’s price oracles can be directly integrated with Enigma’s secure computation protocol to improve usability and end-user experience. One key use we have identified is facilitating ENG/ETH gas price conversion with Chainlink oracles.

“Secret contracts” on Enigma interoperate with other smart contracts using an Ethereum callback mechanism. When giving a task to Enigma, a user pays for both the secret contract computation and Ethereum callback in ENG. Since it is the Enigma worker who submits the Ethereum callback transaction on-chain, paid ENG must include the ETH gas cost of the callback to maximize usability. Therefore, the going rate for ENG/ETH must be available on-chain. By integrating a Chainlink oracle, a median conversion rate can be calculated from multiple data sources, mitigating the risk of price manipulation.

In the longer term, more complex integrations can maximize the combined and independent power of Enigma’s secure computation protocol and Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network. One such integration is the use of Chainlink nodes to submit oracle data as tasks to Secret Contracts. Application developers will be able to use APIs available via Chainlink to trigger events in their contracts.

Some potential use cases in which the two protocols can address existing challenges in the blockchain space include:

• Off-chain payments: a non-crypto payment could trigger the release of data within a secret contract.
• Social integrations: a Twitter “following” list could be used to whitelist certain users, and be updated in real-time.
• Cross-chain activity: events on Bitcoin and other blockchains could be used in the logic of secret contracts.

On the enterprise side, Enigma provides an implementation of the Trusted Compute Framework that is compatible with Ethereum mainnet. This can bridge the needs of enterprises with the benefits of a public, permissionless blockchain. Enigma enables common enterprise use-cases around logistics and tracking, secure data-sharing, access-control, and identity management. A Chainlink oracle integration closes the loop between real-world data feeds, private computation with Enigma, and the public Ethereum blockchain.

At a high level, all these use-cases involve using Chainlink nodes to submit task data to a secret contract on Enigma. The diagram below outlines a high-level potential model for this integration. (Please note that for the purposes of creating a concise diagram we have made simplifications omitting some essential processes, such as data verification).

We will continue to work together to find technical improvements to these integrations in order to help developers find tangible solutions to real-world problems. We look forward to exploring other joint initiatives in order to facilitate the growth of both projects, as well as the blockchain and smart contract ecosystems as a whole.

Enigma CEO and co-founder Guy Zyskind:

“Both Chainlink and Enigma recognize the critical challenges facing the adoption of decentralized technologies and smart contracts, including privacy, scalability, and usability. This collaboration and integration work between our teams will allow us to create novel solutions that unlock substantial value for developers, enterprises, and end users.”

Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov:

“We’re excited to collaborate with Enigma around solving smart contract privacy, one of the critical problems limiting smart contract adoption, especially from traditional markets. We’re excited to explore the plethora of use cases that become available to developers by combining Chainlink’s decentralized oracles with Enigma’s secret computation framework.”

What is Enigma?

At Enigma, our mission is to ensure global adoption and usage of decentralized technologies. We are working to achieve this by bringing privacy and the ability to use sensitive data to blockchains.

Enigma is a secure computation protocol which is able to run blockchain functions, or smart contracts, on sensitive (secret) data. First founded and researched at MIT in 2015, Enigma’s network of “secret nodes” can perform computations over encrypted data at scale without ever exposing the raw data itself. Smart contracts built with Enigma become “secret contracts”, allowing developers to create thousands of new, valuable solutions.

Enigma’s open-source protocol is designed to be blockchain-agnostic, helping solve privacy, scalability, and usability for any blockchain, as well as the applications built on them. Enigma will have powerful applications across industries such as personal data, identity, healthcare, credit, finance, and many others. Anyone can begin building secret contracts today using Enigma’s developer testnet. More information at: blog.enigma.co/developers

Enigma’s team is made up of experienced researchers, developers, and businesspeople. The Enigma core team formed at MIT, including co-founder and CEO Guy Zyskind, author of Enigma’s whitepapers (1,000+ academic citations) and one of the world’s foremost experts on privacy and decentralization. Enigma has also built a global community of privacy advocates and enthusiasts numbering in the tens of thousands who support our project, mission, and vision for a decentralized future. Additional information on our company, team, and technologies can be found on the Enigma website and company blog: blog.enigma.co

What is Chainlink?

Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that will give smart contracts secure and reliable access to data providers, web APIs, enterprise systems, cloud providers, IoT devices, payment systems, other blockchains and much more. It will feature the following:

1. Binding service agreements between the oracle providers and querying smart contracts that outline the terms of service
2. A robust market of independent oracles providing a range of data and connections
3. Flexibility to customize an oracle connection including the number of oracles, types and number of data sources, aggregation strategies, staking deposits, trusted execution environments, Mixicles and more
4. A reputation framework for evaluating oracles based on on-chain metrics

It’s an all-in-one network for users to customize how their contract communicates with anything off-chain using varying levels of decentralization, data aggregation, and oracle selection.

It’s backed by an experienced team of developers, academics, and proven business leaders with an extensive background in pioneering emerging technology and scaling global enterprises. Chainlink is recognized as one of the top blockchain companies by leading independent research firms such as Gartner, and featured in leading publications such as MIT Technology Review, Forbes, Coindesk, and more. It is well known for providing highly secure and reliable oracles to large enterprises (Google, Oracle, and SWIFT) and leading smart contract development teams (Ethereum, Polkadot, Hedera).

Learn More about Enigma

Learn more by visiting the Enigma website, Twitter or Telegram. If you’re a developer, visit our dedicated Developers Forum, look through our Developers Blog, read through our protocol documentation, our join our Discord for further support and discussion.

Learn More about Chainlink

Learn more by visiting the Chainlink website, Twitter or Telegram. If you’re a developer, visit the developer documentation or join the technical discussion on Discord.

Note: chainlinkecosystem.com does not claim any ownership of this content, all credit to Enigma, view official announcement.