So to help with my understanding, the inner workings and results of the secret smart contracts are hidden, but any updates to the public ledger remain public?
Guy Zyskind: „The new state is encrypted as a set of shares spread across several nodes (and will remain encrypted unless they collude). You can also store the new state on the ledger - encrypt each share with a specific party’s public key and keep it on the ledger. These parties can then do future state updates using those shares.”
Correct, the smart contract can query the secret contract for the data, and it can call on a confirm or deny basis without any of the sensitive data on the secret contract from becoming public.
This is a big problem today because all that data that appears on smart contracts is permanently public on the ledger for eternity.
The current solution for these DApps is to store private information on off chain solutions. Data from users to these DApps that they give, the users or organizations themselves can’t verify this data is truly safe, and private. Where as, Enigma is the ultimate solution because organizations can trust that the protocol itself is sufficient to protect their data, and customer data from being publicly viewable.