Enclave Community Update no°1
Happy New Year, privacy builders & systems alchemists! For those new here: Enclave is an open-source protocol for collaborative confidential compute, enabling shared computation with verifiable outcomes, without exposing underlying data.
We’re kicking off the year by preparing for a public testnet, pushing forward our secret ballot protocol and PVSS milestones, and engaging the broader ecosystem to explore early Enclave use cases. Below is a snapshot of where things stand.
Technical Progress & R&D
Our current focus is Phase 1 of the technical roadmap. In this phase, we’re building a private testnet where at least five remote nodes can communicate successfully and execute a small-scale CRISP (Coercion‑Resistant Impartial Selection Protocol) program.
This initial CRISP deployment serves as a privacy-preserving voting system with encrypted ballots and verifiable results. It allows us to validate node communication and core voting mechanics before scaling toward larger deployments.
So far, we’ve made significant strides on the technical front, hitting key internal milestones:
- Core architecture finalized
- Major components implemented
- Audits underway
- Benchmarks running
Work continues on tooling, refactors, and security hardening to ensure the system is robust and scalable.
Key Highlights:
- PVSS circuits: Public Verifiable Secret Sharing (PVSS) circuits are 95% complete. We are finalizing aggregation, recursion, and resolving a small number of remaining issues. The circuits now work with both insecure and production parameters.
- Generator updates: The generator is being updated to the latest PVSS implementation, enabling the creation of example witnesses, configurations, and templates. This allows us to simulate the full system flow and benchmark across parameter sets.
- Encryption/Decryption: Ciphernodes can now successfully encrypt and decrypt BFV secret shares. This simplifies the next phase of full system integration.
- CRISP integration in Aragon: The Aragon plugin for CRISP is nearing completion.
Together, these technical milestones prepare Enclave for its first end-to-end testnet, bringing Enclave closer to secure, verifiable execution.
What’s next:
As we move toward our first internal testnet, the team is focused on several key priorities:
- Node setup and communication: Getting all nodes running successfully and communicating with each other to run the initial CRISP program.
- PVSS documentation: Finalizing PVSS documentation and preparing a technical blog post to share our work and insights publicly.
- PVSS & generator integration: Completing proof generation and verification across nodes and on-chain.
- Aggregation & recursion: Implementing aggregation of secret shares and recursive verification to support scalability.
- Transition to production parameters: Once the above is stable, we’ll move from insecure parameters to full production parameters, aligning with Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the roadmap.
These steps are critical for validating Enclave end-to-end and preparing for real-world deployments.
Ecosystem & Early Use Cases
Use Case Spotlight: Aragon + Enclave
Aragon and Enclave are collaborating to bring privacy‑preserving, verifiable secret ballots to on‑chain governance.
Using Enclave’s CRISP protocol, DAOs can run encrypted, tamper-resistant votes that are fully verifiable on-chain without exposing individual ballots. Current work includes:
- Building a proof-of-concept governance plugin.
- Ensuring encryption, proof generation, and verification work seamlessly across nodes.
- Preparing for real DAO experiments where privacy and coercion resistance are essential.
This enables confidential governance for DAOs – from sensitive funding decisions to leadership elections – giving communities the confidence to vote honestly without external pressures.
Additional early conversations
Beyond governance, we are in early-stage conversations across several emerging use cases:
- Governance integrations with Tally, Snapshot, and Octant.
- Sealed-bid auction designs with Metalex and Legion
- Privacy-preserving data analytics with Session and APlus.
These efforts are exploratory, but they help validate Enclave’s applicability across governance, markets, and analytics.
Get Involved
You can catch Enclave founder Auryn Macmillan at ETH Denver in February, where he'll be speaking on "Collaborative Privacy: Computing Together Without Exposure."
Join our Telegram channel and keep your eyes peeled for announcements as we approach the Enclave testnet launch!
If you’re building applications or systems that require confidentiality, verifiability, or multi-party computation, start with the Enclave docs.