MIT Media Lab’s Blockchain-Based Encrypted Data Marketplace To Launch Beta Soon

MIT Media Lab’s blockchain-based encrypted data marketplace, Enigma, is going to launch beta soon, according to its website. Bitcoin Magazine explains that the encryption system will enable anonymous participants to securely share information with a third party.

“Enigma is a decentralized cloud platform with guaranteed privacy. Private data is stored, shared and analyzed without ever being fully revealed to any party. Secure multi-party computation, empowered by the blockchain, is the magical technology behind it”, states the official website.

Enigma whitepaper written by Nathan, Zyskind and Pentland describes it as a peer-to-peer (P2P) network that enables different parties to jointly store and run computations on data while keeping the data completely private.

“Enigma's computational model is based on a highly optimized version of secure multi-party computation, guaranteed by a verifiable secret-sharing scheme. For storage, Enigma uses a modified distributed hashtable for holding secret-shared data”, the white paper reads.

“An external blockchain is utilized as the controller of the network, manages access control, identities and serves as a tamper-proof log of events. Security deposits and fees incentivize operation, correctness and fairness of the system," it continues. "Similar to Bitcoin, Enigma removes the need for a trusted third party, enabling autonomous control of personal data. For the first time, users are able to share their data with cryptographic guarantees regarding their privacy.”

Bitcoin Magazine said that since July, Enigma team’s work has been mainly focused on its implementation, proving the Enigma protocol in an academic paper and talking with potential users to understand what the most interesting use cases are.

“The most interesting use case we're hearing from potential users is the ability to do data science and machine learning on encrypted data sets. Other use cases include private smart contracts and 'IoT with privacy',” Zyskind told Bitcoin Magazine.