Enigma – Cryptocurrency Review

Hi Fellow Steemians! Today I’m going to do a crypto review of Enigma (ENG). Enigma appears to be gaining in popularity over the past couple of months, which you can see by examining the google trends search results as shown below.

However, compared to some of the other cryptos I’ve recently reviewed, Enigma is still flying under the radar comparatively. For instance, when compared to RaiBlocks and Steemit in google trends, the difference in search results becomes much more apparent.

Now you might be thinking, wait a second aren’t you comparing apples to oranges as RaiBlocks is currently sitting at position #19, Steem is sitting at position #35 and Enigma is sitting at position #85 on coinmarketcap at the time of writing this post. Consequently, we’d naturally expect the search results for RaiBlocks and Steem to be higher compared to Enigma. Well not exactly. The google trend search results only paint part of a picture of course. Evidence for this can be seen by examining the google trend search results for Ethos (position #49), compared to
Enigma (position #85) and Zclassic (position #97).

The point being is that out of the 1,260 cryptocurrency coins currently being offered, chances are you may not have heard about Enigma just yet but that’s okay. In this post, we’ll cover what Enigma is and what makes Enigma unique compared to other cryptos currently being offered on the market.

What is Enigma?

What makes Enigma stand out amongst the crowd of coins is the underlying technology and team behind Enigma. Although Enigma is not normally easily explained due to their technologically advanced whitepaper, the basis is a decentralized peer-to-peer network that enables joint computational storage and analysis of data while maintaining privacy. Accordingly, Enigmas overall goals is to:

Enable developers to build ‘privacy by design,’ end-to-end decentralized applications, without a trusted third party.

How Enigma solves concerns about privacy & scalability

Enigma ensures privacy of data by using multi-party computation (MPC), which means data queries are computed in a distributed way. Although data is split between nodes, the computations are performed together without leaking information between nodes. Thus, no single party (or node) has access to data in its entirety. Instead, each node only has access to seemingly random pieces of data at any point in time.

Yes, since Engima operates by only performing a small subset of computations by each node, instead of replicating computations by each node in the network. Enigma increases efficiency by reducing computational redundancies of storage. Thus, allowing for increasing demand of computations. The behind this scalable feature is the utility of Enigma to run computations on data, without having access to the raw data itself, thereby maintaining privacy.

Reading the whitepaper, provided here, they use an analogous use example.

Consider a group of people. Each person provides access to their salary, which together allows the average wage of the group to be computed. As a result, each person learns their relative socioeconomic position amongst the group, while at the same time keeping each members personal salary confidential.

Overall, the Enigma platform provides “off-chain” private contracts which are smart contracts that can execute private information, whereas public information is handled “on-chain” on the blockchain.

This technology provides a fundamental change in the approach to data analysis. In addition to these powerful secret contracts have many advantages over the blockchain technology most other cryptocurrencies used such as Bitcoin. For instance, secret contracts are needed in the Healthcare field in order to maintain compliance with HIPPA laws. Thus secret contracts could help to ensure privacy is maintained in terms of healthcare data or patients medical records, which is not currently possible with blockchain technology used by bitcoin or many other cryptocurrencies.

Enigma’s Other Catalyst

The second major component of Engima is referred to as Catalyst, which is a platform aimed to provide trading tools for cryptocurrency markets. In essence, Catalyst allows users to develop trading algorithms to use in real time with real time data supplied via Enigma. Catalyst is currently in use, interacts with 90 exchanges, and offers a paper trading feature where users can “test” trading strategies without actually using their capital much like Investopedia. In addition, Enigma has released several video tutorials to help new users get started using Catalyst, which you can view view Catalyst videos here.

Meet Enigma’s Team

One of the greatest aspects of Enigma is their team. The team consist of five MIT-bred experts, as well as eight investor advisors and three contributors. In addition, the project is backed by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), which if you didn’t know already is one of the world’s leading research institutes, and E14, which is an investment firm focused on developing MIT based projects and scaling them for real world use.

All the information provided here within can be found on Coinmarketcap and Enigma.

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