The Enigma Project (ENG) revealed Thursday that they will delay the launch of their mainnet, which was slated for release at the end of September. According to the project’s official announcement, this delay is not due to any lack of development, but because the scope of the release has increased. Rather than releasing a barebones mainnet and adding to it, they believe the community will be better served by the eventual release of a mainnet that is more feature rich from the start.
Privacy is a hot topic in crypto, with Russia and Japan both recently revealing their plans to map out transactions and money flows on the blockchain. Privacy focused currencies like Monero (XMR) do exist, of course, but so far they have all focused only on privacy with regards to transactions and wallet contents. Enigma seeks to change this by creating privacy for smart contracts, auctions, voting and data markets, among many other use cases.
Increased Scope
As explained in their announcement, the initial plan for the Enigma mainnet was to create basic functionality for secret voting and and secret auctions. Some code has been presented for these use cases, but they were always meant as proofs of concept, and evidence that the team was going to be able to deliver on the rest of their promises.
The goal was to attract partners – something the team has already had great success with.
In light of that success, the team says, their priorities have shifted, and they now want to prioritize long term development and cooperations on those privacy use cases they have partners for. These were always among the goals of the project, but with partners who want to focus on them, they must take priority over a launch that was mostly intended to help find exactly these kinds of partners.
No Official Launch Date Specified
Although no new launch date is provided in the updated roadmap, immediate priorities are.
The Enigma team will focus on their ongoing development of stateful contracts, private output of data (dApps that send output to users directly, instead of storing data on the chain), as well as their Secure MultiParty Computation engine.
Finally, although the mainnet will initially be released on top of the Ethereum chain – with the ability to interact in privacy with Ethereum smart contracts, it is also becoming clear to the team that an independent Enigma chain will have to be released sooner rather than later. Especially if the project is ever to become truly blockchain agnostic and allow for interaction with many different blockchains.
