What is Enigma Catalyst ?
As the official website puts it, Enigma Catalyst is a data marketplace protocol aimed to allow “people, companies and organizations to contribute and consume data” in a decentralized, open and secure way. Concretely, Catalyst is an off-chain solution that allows anyone to make cross-chain transfers while maintaining full custody of their assets. You can think of it as a decentralized exchange for more than just coins and tokens.
The project will obviously have its own token (ENG) that will be used to access data sources on the Catalyst Data Marketplace. You will also be able to earn tokens by providing liquidity, data, curation and many other valuable services.
What is Enigma for?
As a decentralized exchange protocol, Enigma aims to be a marketplace for crypto-financial everything! It will allow anyone to share and monetize data via Catalyst tokens for quantitative analysis/trading. The official Bitcointalk thread notably says that Enigma Catalyst “empowers anyone to build their own crypto hedge fund and participate in the coming Renaissance of the financial ecosystem”.
Basically, it aims to be a mean for developers and traders to meet, collaborate and compete to produce highly enhanced trading solutions. The protocol itself is advertised as the basis for an ultra-fast and scalable platform that may be able to bridge various blockchains. Interesting, isn’t it?
ICO characteristics
| Start | September 11 |
| End | September 21 |
| Total supply | 150 million ENG tokens |
| Conversion rate | 1 ENG = 0.6$USD |
| Soft Cap | / |
| Hard Cap | 90m$USD |
| Distribution | 50% investors – 25% community incentives – 25% Enigma team and project |
| Use of funds | 60% development – 15% research – 10% operations – 10% marketing – 5% legal |
Team
Enigma team appears to be a solid group of experienced people in the tech field. Most of them are coming from MIT. Cofounders Guy Zyskind and Can Kisagun were already working on an interesting encryption service during the early days of Enigma, back in 2014.
The advisory board includes Prof. Alex Pentland, a Director at MIT Media Lab and a board member at Google and United Nations. Is also present Justin Lent, a former director at Quantopian, a leading platform similar to Enigma outside of the crypto world.
Roadmap
- There is an alpha already released. It allows developers to build and test strategies upon data coming from Poloniex.
- Q3 2017: ICO.
- Q2-Q3 2018: Enigma opens the platform to outside investors.
- Q1 2019: Launch of the Data Marketplace.
Useful links
| Ressources | Social |
| Website | Bitcointalk thread |
| ICO page | |
| Whitepaper | Telegram |
| Blog | Slack |
| Github |
Our advice
Enigma Catalyst is clearly an ICO to not miss. While cryptocurrencies are slowly going mainstream, we need more tools to be able to trade and develop applications efficiently and this is exactly what Catalyst is about. It may not be useful for the average crypto user or trader, but the concept is on the spot and the project seems to be driving on solid rails despite the recent security issues.
On the pure trading side, the Catalyst asset is as good for HODLING as it may be for FLIPPING. Our advice is that you should put some money in it and, whatever the hype post-ICO, keep a significant amount of tokens to profit from future developments.
Update 05 september 2017: Enigma team has decided to raise the token sale CAP to 45M$ (from 30M$) and increase the supply to 150M (from 100M), taking everyone by surprise less than 1 week before the crowdsale. We’ve updated our article, and downgraded the Flip (1 point) and the Hodl (0.5 point) ratings.
