Enigma: Decentralized Computation Platform with Guaranteed Privacy

The problem the paper names

A public contract reveals its inputs. Many agreements — a credit check, a medical rule, a sealed bid — cannot be published in order to be settled. Enigma's proposal is to split data across nodes, compute on the shares, and reveal only the agreed output.

What the design proposes

• Secret sharing splits an input so no single node holds it.
• A computation protocol produces an output without reconstructing the input on one machine.
• A public ledger can store the resulting commitment or payment while the data stays in the private layer.

How the mechanism is specified

• The privacy claim is as strong as the sharing threshold and the honesty assumption in the protocol.
• Performance and the class of programs that are practical are constraints the paper is working under, not details to skip.
• Secret Network's later trusted-execution design is a different technical bet. Do not cite Enigma as if it specified that implementation.

What this page does not treat as proven

• This is not the Secret Network documentation.
• Multi-party computation among a small, static set is a different trust model from a public chain.
• The paper does not make every smart contract private.

Why a venture studio still reads it

The right citation when a venture says 'private smart contracts' and means secret sharing, as opposed to a proof, a trusted enclave, or simply an access-control list. Those four are different products. Enigma is the first.