Seen this question/assumption pop up again and again, so wanted to address it head on.
Just because the Enigma Chain is its own chain with Tendermint PoS consensus (based on Cosmos), doesn’t mean that we’re abandoning Ethereum. It’s important for people to separate the technical aspect from the product/UX aspect of things.
On a technical level, we’ve always said that the network should become chain-agnostic, and for that to happen, we will need our own consensus layer, instead of using Ethereum’s. Moreover, it was obvious that for things to work well, you want strong consistency, which Tendermint supports (as do all other PBFT-based consensus algorithms). Here’s what I said back in May 21, 2018:
But from a product perspective, this does not in any way reduce the value proposition for Ethereum dApp developers. One of the main proposals we plan to work on from a tech perspective (and later propose to the network as a hard fork) is a bridge from Enigma Chain --> Ethereum. For that bridge, we’re considering IBC (Cosmos’ implementation), or, modifying the bridge that we built for Discovery. In either direction, the bridge itself is simpler than a full one-way or two-way peg, which is what Cosmos/IBC is trying to solve. In our case, all we need is a way to chain outputs on the Enigma Chain to Ethereum. This should be far simpler and enough to allow secret contract capabilities on Ethereum.
Most importantly, this approach is scalable to other chains as well. Once we have a mechanism to send secret contract results from Enigma to Ethereum, doing so to other chains is much simpler.
TL;DR we’re not giving up on Ethereum. It’s still a high priority. But the new chain would have better performance overall, and we’ll be able to enable secret contracts in other chains as well.