by its_part_of_trade
Why did enigma move to using TEEs as a first step to secure computations rather than SMPC, given that the bulk of enigma’s work (at least the public facing part) has been SMPC focused? What motivated that change, and what are it’s?
Guy Zyskind: „We determined it’s the right approach. TEEs, other than being blazing fast (hardware-based and not a pure software/cryptographic solution) allow everyone to extract value from secret contracts/encrypted computation immediately. There are less public parameters for developers to consider (which, like in choosing encryption parameters, requires some thought), and more importantly – it’s easier to fit to existing tools like Solidity, Web3, so there’s no learning curve for developers.
The advantage of MPC is that given the network model holds, it provides absolute cryptographic guarantees. That said, dApps are still so nascent that we expect it would take some time to see real production-level applications holding extremely sensitive data. By the time these are ready for prime-time, we should be out with Secret Contracts (2.0), giving them more choice to decide which engine they prefer."