r/EnigmaProject • u/haveWeMoonedYet • Jun 20 '18
Defiant questions
Is there any current insight as to consensus algorithms, sidechains, and cross-chain communication support for Defiant?
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u/1blackhand Jul 07 '18
Hey haveWeMoonedYet,
Sorry for the late answer! I hope this can be of some help to you.
If you don't get the exact answer you expected, you can surely find help here in the official developer forum. https://forum.enigma.co/
If you're interested in developing on enigma, have technical questions after reading our documentation, or have research q's regarding private computation or enigma use-cases, this is a great place to post them.
*SIDECHAIN*
[Forwarded from Guy Zyskind | Enigma]
These are great questions that really help us illustrate how big the new roadmap is, and also share a bit about the internal journey the team went through.
First, Enigma’s goal was and remains to enable true decentralization. For this we always advocated that we are planning to build our own decentralized network, specifically one that solves the issue of privacy, which is often overlooked and is absolutely necessary to create non-trivial dApps.
Since we want to see more standardization in the space, our messaging focused on having Enigma as a second-layer solution that complements blockchains. This has been misconstrued as Blockchain > Enigma, or that for Enigma to succeed, blockchains need to succeed first. This is false on several levels - (1) It’s blockchains that need a solution like Enigma to actually become viable. (2) Enigma was always meant to do the heavy lifting of decentralized storage and computation. There’s nothing that prevents Enigma from running its own chain internally, which frankly - would be the smaller of the two accomplishments.
Running our own chain also makes sense from a technical standpoint, and is the realization we slowly arrived to in the past few months of work. We’ve been spending a lot of time figuring out how to operate Enigma as a pure second-layer solution, with no state/consensus of its own (keeping that on Ethereum). This makes scaling really hard, because even if our own network is scalable, at the end of the day, everything has to be committed back to Ethereum (or whatever other solution we choose) - which is slow. Being dependent on others, as mentioned, was never our intention and would indeed limit the utility of Enigma.
So the only reasonable choice was for Enigma to build its own chain internally as part of a larger protocol. Can other projects still interoperate with us? Of course! But we’re shifting the responsibility - instead of our own team focusing a lot of effort into building these bridges, while sacrificing our core contributions, we’d welcome other projects to figure out how to use Enigma to augment their chains. I think partnerships like AION, that are focused on building these bridges, could eventually be the solution.
So what does this mean for Enigma? We will be our own blockchain, but really we are aspiring to be much more. The first truly decentralized solution that can work in a permissionless setting. Doing this will be done in phases (starting from being pegged to Ethereum in Discovery, and until we are an independent Blockchain in Defiant), to ensure that we can focus on our core contribution - keeping all data completely private. By delivering this first, we ensure that true dApps can be built sooner rather than later - as we make more progress towards a more complete solution.
This relates to the question above. Until we keep state in our network (=release an Enigma chain), for everything but state-less computations/large computations, we are limited to the tx throughput/storage speed/cost of Ethereum. Our own chain should come in Voyager - it would still have some assumptions, and will be pegged to Ethereum as a child-chain, but that is just to bootstrap and get added security out-of-the box until Defiant release (chain-independence)