Secret Network

Secret Network is the first blockchain with private smart contracts (according to the company itself).

Most blockchains that support smart contracts, such as Ethereum, are public by default. It means that all data used in their smart contracts is public. Secret Network improves traditional smart contracts by supporting encrypted inputs and outputs at a protocol level, as well as encrypted smart contract state data. In short, Secret Network provides data privacy for sensitive information stored on the blockchain.

Privacy is essential to the security and mass adoption of all Web3 sectors, from DeFi to metaverses. Secret Network brings new and unique privacy features and can become the foundation for the next generation of successful Web3 applications.

Secret Network's goal is to simplify the adoption and usability of decentralized technologies by providing a wide range of tools and applications designed to preserve user privacy. This privacy is enabled by a new generation of smart contracts - Secret Contracts.

The Secret Foundation is an organization that contributes to the growth of the Secret Network ecosystem. For this purpose, the Secret Foundation promotes privacy as a public good. Secret Foundation helps establish effective and efficient management practices for the community and their foundation. They also create educational content and support a number of committees that help empower individual users and projects.

Protocol

Thanks to Cosmos IBC, Secret Network can communicate with a range of other networks.

To achieve data privacy, the Secret Network protocol leverages key management, encryption protocols, and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE).TEEs guarantee that nodes are unable to view computations that occur within the trusted environment - preserving the privacy of the underlying data during the computation.

Secret Network's underlying ledger is public; a native SCRT token is used for governance, transactions, and gas fees.

The protocol implements programmable privacy, which is defined as arbitrarily complex data privacy controls within an application. Programmable privacy allows tokens to be wrapped into their private and fungible equivalent using the Secret Network SNIP-20 standard via Secret Contract. Blocks are created and added approximately every six seconds with a soft limit of approximately twenty-two transactions per second due to the gas limit per block. The current protocol architecture and design can theoretically support up to 10,000 transactions per second.

Secret Network Capabilities

The scheme shows the opportunity to secretly withdraw funds from a wallet (suppose, for example, that was discredited on CEX) to a newly created wallet. This mechanism also allows you to secretly transfer funds from your wallet to someone else's (for example, to make a payment). If the payment is made through an intermediary wallet, even the recipient will not be able to determine where the funds came from.

Sienna Swap is presented here to show the ability to swap your coin for the private equivalent, so even the amount sent and received of coins cannot indirectly link your 2 wallets.

Another important advantage of Secret Network is the inability to use frontrunning:

Validators

The default number of validator nodes in the Secret Network is 80, with the possibility for more nodes to join the network after a modification to the protocol parameters has been agreed upon.

Validators earn rewards from transaction fees and block rewards. Users can delegate tokens to validators and receive rewards like validators (delegators also must pay a small percentage of the rewards to validators).

Tokenomics

Secret Network has a variable inflation rate that ranges from 7% to 15%. As of April 2023, Secret Network circulation supply was about 98,5 million SCRTs and the total supply was about 252 million SCRT.

Validator nodes can charge a commission on delegated SCRT. Currently, the minimum commission rate is 0% and the maximum is 20%. The validator commission rate is only capable of changing by up to 1% every 24 hours.

In addition to the commission rate, there are two additional sets of fees on earned block rewards: the community fee (2%) and the Secret Foundation fee (15%). The community fee gets pulled from all block rewards and is sent to a pool known as the Community Pool. This pool is used to fund on-chain governance proposals.

In the future, Secret Network technology perhaps will impact all areas in which blockchain technology can be used. Health care, finance, banking, government, communications, media, supply chains, voting, music and entertainment, real estate, insurance, gambling, messaging and many others. Secret Network protocol using TEEs is the programmable privacy de facto standard for contract development for the future of Web 3.0.

More details in the overview section of the official website.

Secret Bridges

Secret-Ethereum Bridge, a bridge to the Ethereum network, was launched on December 15, 2020. It is the first of many bridges to other ecosystems. This bridge allowed users to convert Ethereum and 14 other ERC-20 tokens to their Secret equivalent (SNIP-20). Secret Bridges connect the Secret Network with other blockchain networks, allowing users from different ecosystems to create privacy-preserving versions of their assets, called Secret Tokens.

The concept of Secret Tokens is very interesting: they are programmable, like ERC-20, and can be used in applications, but they are private by default, like Monero and similar coins. Once assets cross the Secret Bridge as Secret Tokens, they can be used in Secret DeFi applications, which are natively private and compatible with multiple networks, which means the assets support different blockchain ecosystems. Secret already allows a number of tokens to be moved and swapped on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. New bridges will provide the same access and functionality to other networks.

Secret Bridges utilizes multisig authorization. 3 out of 5 operators trusted with operating the bridge are required to approve (sign) the transaction. Bridge operators are very reputable staking operators: Figment, Staked, B-Harvest, Citadel.one and Enigma.

The multi-signature authorization process makes it much more difficult to compromise Secret Bridges, removing the single point of failure associated with single-signature systems.

The network has also entered into a strategic partnership with Axelar. This integration will enable Secret Network to connect to Axelar's interoperability network, opening up new possibilities for linking Secret with other blockchains, even beyond IBC.

Since Axelar is already connected to Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Moonbeam, Fantom, and several blockchains in IBC, integrating with Secret will bring something new for everyone - privacy.

Secret NFTs

Secret NFTs are NFTs with programmable privacy features. With Secret NFTs verifiable ownership of goods and experiences does not have to be public! The process of validation takes place without compromising any private data, including proof of authenticity and translations.