ENIGMA excellent project with a nice growing potential

Analysis to come

Comment:

Soo Enigma is a privacy protocol, network for private computations that protects sensitive data. Basically Enigma allows to put a data on the blockchain which can be analyzed for a different purpose but can`t be seen. For example let`s say that some scientist wants to calculate an average size of middle fingers of some group of people. They send their size and it`s possible to calculate an average size but it`s not possible to see who sent given size, neither sizes sent by different participators. Stupid example but basically you can compute on data but you can`t see it. Very useful thing which can be used in many business including huge like health or finance so market potential is big. It`s also connected to a very important area of blockchain technology- privacy (another one is scalability problem which Enigma also tries to solve). They use secret contracts for that which are like an equivalent of smart contracts. Second part of the project is a Catalyst app- the first investment platform that enables developers to build, test, and execute crypto-fund. It allows live trading and works with many exchanges already. Users can test their trading strategies without a real money. In December they`ve released 0.4 version which was the biggest release so far and it`s getting pretty advanced, a lot of users trying it. It`ll be working with a marketplace where people will be able to sell their data. Quite impressive.

So let`s take a look at the team. Most of guys behind the project are MIT based including CEO Guy Zyskind. He was previously working on ETHOS which is really popular project nowadays. Frederic Fortier who is their senior software engineer made numerous enterprise apps for some large financial institutions. One of advisors is Prof. Alex Pentland who is a director of MIT Media Lab and one of most known data scientists currently. He is a co-author of the whitepaper. Other are for example Kevin Zhou (Galois Capital, former head of trading at Kraken) or Justin Lent (a former director of hedge fund development at Quantopian). Amongst investors you can find MIT of course and DGC group- known venture capital investing in interesting coins and blockchain connected projects. What`s the downside is that team is relatively small. Anyway they are currently hiring and they plan to make it more than double during coming weeks what`s a good sign. They are being seletive to gather a hard working, harmounious group.

Website is one of best I`ve seen in crypto world. It looks extremely nice in my opinion and it`s also very transparent with all the info needed, soon they plan upgrading it. Whitepaper or rather whitepapers (as there are separate version for protocol and DAPP) are well made. Community is big and growing rapidly... Over 13k members in very active telegram group, pretty nice. They`ve also started a discord channel with around 5k members already, active reddit and twitter with over 40k followers, regular updates on Medium, basically everything looks as it should. Google trends is suggesting a nice increase in interest since December. There was a positive community update a few days ago which you can read here:

blog.enigma.co/enigm...19-2018-5d9e22394d64

They mention that soon there will be an important development news to share about the Enigma data marketplace for Catalyst app. Their partners include Aion, Kyber, ETHLend, investFeed, EtherDelta and they are part of MIT STEX25. If we are talking about potential industrial partners it should be easier to find them with MIT backup.

Comment:

There are also two issues I have to mention as I don`t try to sell a product, I try to make a review as much objective as possible. Around 5 months ago their website and some social accounts including Slack got hacked:

techcrunch.com/2017/...k-enigma-500000-ico/

It was pre ico and resulted in people sending almost 500k to hacker`s account even Enigma team warned it`s community that it won`t collect any money prior to this ico. It`s obviously not the thing which should happen especially to the team with such a background running this type of project. Anyway, money was refunded and ico was oversubscribed. They`ve also increased a hard cap so of token sale by 50% before it but that`s not that big issue. Basically, it`s your choice if you should skip buying because of these factors. What you can be sure of it`s not some random scam, it was planned since years (it was an academic project before) and got a support of very respected institution. Since it happened Enigma has grown significantly. Negative feedback under YT videos about it etc. almost disappears, they plan to expand overseas and it seems it has a bright future. I think that creators learnt their lesson and the risk is worth of taking.

Price went up since December where some hype started but current market cap is around $380 000 000 which is still relatively small these days when you consider that it`s one of most interesting projects out there. It can grow a few times till end of the year in my opinion. Supply is 150 000 000, around half in a circulation so basically not big. ATH was around $8. This is a long term investment and very ambitious project so don`t treat it like a quick money maker. Anyway considering a progress they are making, growing interest, potential partnerships etc. we should see a stable growth over coming months with med 2018 being a breakthrough.