Enigma’s Guy Zyskind: ‘I’m Pro-Whatever Kind of Blockchain Fits Decentralization Ideals’

I'm Guy Ziskin, co founder and CEO of Enigma. Enigma is building a platform for privacy preserving smart contracts. We call these secret contracts because nodes in the network are actually computing over encrypted data, which is data that they don't see. This is in contracts to public blockchains like Ethereum and pretty much everything else. My background is born in Israel, raised in Israel, moved like five years ago to the States, went to grad school at mit. That's really where I got interested in blockchain and the intersection of privacy. I published a few papers. One of them was the Enigma white paper, which was the predecessor to the platform that we've been building today.

So can you tell me a bit about your work at mit? I saw on the website that you teach a class on blockchain there, right?

That was a few years ago. So it was when the digital Currency initiative was formed and we were like, okay, we have great students, great talent. There was a few of us. So me, Madaras from zcash and a few others were talking about like, you know, we need more people working on blockchain at mit. And we said, okay, let's open a class. So I taught a class together with one of the head, basically the head developer in circle and another person from the dci which was very successful and as I mentioned, published a few papers on the topic of blockchain privacy.

So how did the students like the class? Did you have a lot of enthusiasm for blockchain?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So we had like, I believe 40 people, which for like the first time class was like arranged like two weeks before the start of the semester, was a really good number. We got really good projects. So what we did was we taught the students, you know, what blockchain is, what consensus is. Ethereum was only beginning. So we didn't teach as much Ethereum as we did bitcoin. But we let people experiment both with a little bit with Serpent back then. That was before solidity and with Bitcoin. And then we had the finals where people presented their projects and that was really cool. One of the projects, all of them were great. One of the projects actually became a paper of its own. And one of the first projects of the dci, which I believe is very, very cited, it was about blockchain in the medical industry.

So do you see MIT offering this class more in the future or is this like a one time thing A few years ago.

So I know that after we taught it there was a bit of a break, but from what I've heard recently the class is now returning and there's actually even more people working on it and more researchers. So blockchain at MIT has really evolved in those spheres, which is amazing.

Are you still working with MIT at all or are you just working with Enigma now full time?

So I'm working on Enigma full time. We are affiliated to MIT, so MIT through the E14 fund and the Engine Fund have invested in us. My professor, my thesis advisor, Sandy Pentland is a co founder and an advisor to the company. We're still very often at mit, very connected to the ecosystem, but we're not directly affiliated with MIT today.

So my next question is on your website profile it says that you're a bitcoin evangelist. So what are you doing at an Ethereum meetup today?

Well, I'm not a bitcoin maximalist. I'm pro decentralization basically. So I got hooked on Bitcoin because of the idea that you can do consensus at scale, at Internet scale for the first time. That's what took me in Bitcoin and you know, I'm very much pro Ethereum and pro whatever, blockchain that can feed those kind of, those kind of ideals.

So when's the first time you heard the word bitcoin? When's the first time cryptocurrency became a real concept to you?

Oh, that's, that's an unfortunate story. So it was 2010, we had like our own geeky close IRC group of people and my friend was like, oh, there's this cool thing, bitcoin, you should download it and we should start mining. And we were all like, yeah, sure, forget about it. And this was 2010, so could have been really interesting. I seriously got into it around 2013, so started working on it in 2012. 2013 is really when I got hooked. And since then I've been working on it full time.

So my next question is someone, I guess, I don't know if you'd call yourself a blockchain expert, but you know a lot about blockchain since you taught a course on it. I was wondering if you could explain kind of in layman's terms the difference between the Ethereum blockchain and the bitcoin blockchain.

Sure. I mean, actually, you know, when Ethereum started, people were saying bitcoin does not allow you to do any type of computation, any type of application. It's only mildly true. It's true that Ethereum built like a way to build more kind of applications. And just like you know, sending payments. I still think that both Bitcoin and Ethereum are basically giving us Internet scale consensus. So having a system where you have different actors, different machines that can reach the same conclusion on some problem. In Bitcoin, the problem is, you know, storing a ledger in a way that everyone agrees, even if they're, even if they're like dishonest and malicious. To me, the big difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin is the ecosystem. Ethereum really made it possible and accessible for developers to start developing applications that can run not in one place, but in many places at once.

My next question for you is about Enigma's recent partnership with Intel. Could you just talk a little bit about that, what you're doing with intel, what they're doing in the blockchain industry.

Sure. So basically what we offer, what we are working on and focusing on that others are not, is how to create scalable and privacy preserving smart contracts. So right now, when you look at blockchains, the way they've been developed, Ethereum included, is that you take computation and verification and you do it at the same place. So in Ethereum, if you have an application running as a smart contract on the blockchain, basically every node in the network has to run every computation and validate that computation, which is very, very costly. So we're trying to split that and we're trying to make sure that all computations that are happening are working on data that the nodes themselves cannot see. There are several ways to do it. There are hardware assisted ways and there are purely cryptographic ways. At Enigma, we're developing both because we want to give developers a choice when it comes to hardware assistance techniques. That's known as trusted execution environments. Intel has been developing one of the leading examples of that, which is called intel sgx. And we've used that to build our first iteration of the testnet. And we partnered with intel together to actually develop that farther, to kind of see how far this technology can go, how helpful it can be for Enigma and for blockchains in general, and also to continue research on how we can improve these systems and make them even more trustless and more permissionless.

Another thing that I read online while looking up questions about you is there's Enigma and there's Catalyst. So what's the difference between those two?

Sure. So Catalyst was started as some kind of like internal project. Callis is basically a tool chain, an open source tool chain that allows people to do algo trading on crypto. There's a lot of users right now, including Hedge funds and big players that are using it. It started as a fun, as a fun internal project, but we came to the realization that in some form of another, these applications somewhere down the road could actually run on the Enigma protocol in a decentralized way. So we continue developing that and we still continue developing that. Right now we have a team dedicated on improving that. But it is not our main focus. Our main focus is really to build the Enigma protocol and Enigma Protocol is basically a privacy preserving blockchain.

And the testnet launched recently?

Yeah, testnet launched a week ago. It's kind of like a developer preview. So if you're a developer, you can basically fork it or just clone the repository and basically install it. There's some kind of test mode that you can start writing and testing secret contracts. So if you're a developer, we really recommend that you test it out as full developer docs and a forum dedicated for it.

So is what you're doing with the secret contracts the first of its kind or are there any other protocols out there that are also trying to do the same thing?

So as far as we know, we're the first of our kind. Definitely. When we started 2015 that was like the first time privacy preserving smart contracts came to even as an idea. And, and I believe we have the first implementation of that in the world right now.

Okay, so you didn't end up mining Bitcoin back in 2010? 10, but are you invested in it now? Do you hold, do you just not even bother?

I hold some Bitcoin, I hold some Ethereum, obviously I hold Enigma. Yeah, that's pretty much it when it comes to the space.

So you don't like to play around with altcoin trading things like that?

Honestly, I don't have the bandwidth. I'm more in this for the tech. I'm really interested in what we're building. I'm less in this for investing and I think I'm a really poor investor.

In the future, like 10 years down the line. I mean there's a lot of different blockchain protocols out there right now. Do you think that any are going to fall by the wayside? Do you see any. What's going to be left when all the.

So I think it's safe to say that most protocols won't exist, most tokens won't exist. I think there will be more than like one or two winners. I think there's a place for like 10, 20, maybe even 50. But what I'm really curious about is to see how protocols and projects would start merging with each other because obviously it's not, it's not possible to have 2,000 projects. And if you look at the 2014 kind of bear market, there was, there were all these like altcoins of bitcoin, all these forks, and most of them didn't survive, but some did. So I think some will survive. And those are the ones that are doing like really legit work and are actually advancing the tech and the applications.

So when you taught the class on blockchain, how did you begin? How did you try to introduce that to students? You know, like a student that had never heard of that word before. Like, how do you get them into that?

So with an example, I just explained bitcoin. I'm just saying, let's say there's like a new company, Nucor, okay? And Nucor says we are minting new kind of money, right? It's stored in our own database and you can transact with it. We would give $1 to every person in the world and you can start transacting with it. And my question, but then after that point, if you want to buy more of that, you're going to start to have deposit money. And this is an untrusted company, not a bank, not affiliated with a country. And I ask people in the class, are you comfortable trusting and continuing to pour money into that kind of system? And the answer is always no by everyone. And then I started to explain how bitcoin works in a very high level way and how even though you don't trust one entity, if you have many of them and you don't trust them individually, somehow collectively, you can trust them to actually transact and approve any transaction that you send to people. And that kind of clicks. And from that we go more technical.

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