About

Secret Network is a blockchain platform that specializes in private smart contracts, enabling users to build and use decentralized applications with encrypted data. It emphasizes customizable privacy, offering solutions for secure and confidential transactions and interactions within the Web3 space.

History

Mainnet Launch Secret Network's mainnet went live on Feb. 13, 2020. It launched as Enigma, a project founded in 2017 to bring a second-layer private computation solution to Ethereum. The Enigma team announced the network's launch on the same day it revealed its settlement with the U.S. SEC over Enigma's $45 million ICO in 2017. The project later rebranded to Secret Network in May 2020. Enigma MPC (the company behind the original Enigma protocol) is now one of several development groups that contribute to Secret Network's underlying technology.

Unlike Enigma's initial vision, Secret Network is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol built using the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint consensus engine featuring the native token SCRT. The launch of Secret Network was assisted by over 20 validators supporting the network. The next critical step in the ecosystem occurred in early June with the creation of the Secret Foundation, an organization established to promote the growth and adoption of the Secret Network ecosystem. The Secret Foundation advocates for privacy as a public good and helps provide tools, technologies, education, and support necessary to preserve user privacy.

On Jun. 20, 2020, the Secret Games Incentivized Testnet began and ran for almost two months. Over 100 users participated in the event. This testnet event enabled Secret Network developers to stress test the chain in a live adversarial environment in preparation for the “Vulcan” hard fork upgrade, which eventually enabled smart contracts (or Secret Contracts) on mainnet.

ENG Token Swap & Wallet Support On Jun. 24, 2020, the burn contract for SCRT was initiated. This burn contract enabled owners of ERC-20 token ENG to convert their cryptocurrency to SCRT. Since then, approximately 62 million SCRT have been sent from the burn contract. Another 35+ million SCRT were swapped by Binance on Sep. 29, 2020. Binance later became the first major exchange to list SCRT for trading. SCRT holders were able to participate in governance and staking, and they could also use their tokens to execute secret contracts.

The Keplr and MathWallet wallets support Secret Network and SCRT tokens. Secret Network's governance proposal #19 saw SCRT holders vote to fund the team behind the Keplr wallet (using funds from the Secret community pool) to create a MetaMask UX equivalent for the Secret Network. This wallet would eventually add support for Secret Contracts and applications.

Secret Contracts & Applications On Sep. 15, 2020, the Secret Network successfully hard forked and upgraded the protocol from “secret-1” to “secret-2”. This upgrade enabled Secret Contracts (smart contracts with privacy by default). On Dec. 4, 2021, the Secret Network reached fifty active validators. The Secret Ethereum Bridge launched on Dec. 15, 2021, which Secret Network developers say will be the first of many bridges to other ecosystems. This bridge allowed users to wrap Ethereum and fourteen other ERC-20s to their Secret Network equivalents (which operate under the SNIP-20 standard). Over two million SCRT were offered up as bridge mining rewards to encourage liquidity and adoption.

SecretSwap, Secret Network's first major application-layer DeFi application, launched on Mar. 31, 2021. It is a privacy-first, cross-chain Automated Market Maker (AMM) protocol. Since Secret Swap uses secret contracts, it has the following features:

1. Front-Running Prevention: Inputs in the mempool are encrypted, which means miners can’t extract value by reordering or frontrunning your transactions
2. Privacy: As inputs to a swap contract are encrypted, users data and transactions remain private assuming more than one address executes a swap each block