Major institutions, from global banks and centralized national identity registries to hospitals and government agencies, are increasingly looking to leverage blockchain technology in order to increase transparency, security, and efficiency. However, one fundamental barrier continues to stand in the way: privacy.
Public blockchains offer decentralization, verifiability, and immutability, but expose transaction data to the world. For sectors that handle sensitive information, like finance, healthcare, or identity governance, this is a non-starter. This is largely why all institutional blockchain experiments have been confined to private networks that don't connect and interoperate with public blockchain infrastructure.
The question then remains: how to leverage secure, privacy-preserving public infrastructure to connect siloed networks at a scale fit for institutional adoption?
Today, we announce Enigma upgrade to Avail DA, bringing the first encrypted data availability (DA) layer designed for transporting sensitive data on public blockchains and enabling private rollups to submit encrypted data to public infrastructure without leaking confidential information. Developed in collaboration with Encifher, Enigma upgrade makes it possible to deploy private rollups that retain the scalability, security, and composability of Avail’s public rollups, while ensuring that no sensitive data is ever publicly exposed. With Enigma upgrade, Avail opens doors for the trillion-dollar financial, healthcare, and mainstream enterprise markets to connect to public blockchains with secure privacy baked in.
The Enterprise Data Availability Dilemma
Blockchain adoption in enterprise environments often requires a choice between two unsatisfactory options:
- Public rollups offer trustless settlement but expose onchain transactions, contracts, and state updates to the public.
- Private chains, which protect data but require siloed infrastructure, compromise on decentralization and limit connectivity to the broader ecosystem.
There are some combinations that exist that allow private rollups to post encrypted data (as on Ethereum L1). However, all these options require a trade-off to be made, which usually impacts privacy and creates a scalability bottleneck. This does not currently fulfill the ambitions of major institutional players in finance, supply chains, healthcare and the public sector.
Enigma Upgrade: A New Encrypted DA Foundation for Rollups
With the Enigma upgrade, Avail DA can natively support encrypted data blobs on public infrastructure, offering institutions a secure mechanism to publish verifiable and secure rollup data. This means rollups can now operate with execution privacy and ensure their data is available and verifiable on Avail’s public blockchain network, without exposing sensitive information in the public domain. Furthermore, it helps them build a core architectural foundation where they can communicate with other rollups in a privacy-preserving fashion, unlocking new use cases like cross-border payments, real estate tokenization, bonds and financial instrument tokenization.
Here’s what Enigma brings to the table:
- Full Data Encryption: All transaction data, metadata, and patterns are encrypted before being posted to Avail.
- Cryptographically Verifiable: Participants cryptographically verify that data is available to the network and in its original form.
- Scalable by Design: Avail’s horizontally scalable base layer allows for exponentially higher throughput and is capable of absorbing institutional demands.
- Permissioned Access: Regulators, auditors, or partners can decrypt specific data segments using pre-approved keys.
In short, institutions can now have the best of both worlds. They get to continue using privacy-preserving rollups within secure environments while transacting over horizontally scalable public infrastructure, with secure encryption to protect sensitive data.
How It Works: An Overview
- Rollup Execution: Institutions can deploy private rollups using familiar frameworks like the OP Stack, ZKsync, Starkware (Madara), Arbitrum Orbit, or Polygon CDK.
- Source Encryption: Sensitive data (e.g., trades, health records, legal filings) gets encrypted at the application layer before submission to Avail.
- Enigma Integration: Batched rollup data undergoes a second encryption process via Enigma before it is published to Avail.
- Access Controls: Institutions can communicate with Avail's public blockchain network while maintaining selective disclosures and permissioned access.
This combines confidentiality and horizontal scalability, making it suitable for real-world deployment in high-throughput and heavily regulated industries.
Enterprise Use Case: Issuing Tokenized Bonds with Privacy, Compliance & Scale
Imagine a global investment bank planning to issue $1 billion in tokenized bonds on a public blockchain. Traditionally, this would raise red flags around data exposure, regulatory compliance, operational security and throughput constraints. With the Enigma upgrade, those barriers disappear.
Here’s how it would work:
- Private Execution: All trade activity, client KYC, and settlement instructions are encrypted at the sequencer, ensuring no sensitive data is exposed publicly.
- Confidential Rollup Processing: The rollup processes these encrypted transactions privately, maintaining full confidentiality.
- Encrypted Data Availability: Before posting to Avail, Enigma applies a second encryption, allowing the rollup to prove data integrity and correctness without revealing its contents.
- Scalable by Design: Avail’s horizontal scalability and fast finality allow for the speed and scale needed to fulfill significant financial use cases.
- Authorized Controls: Authorized entities can decrypt specific data with pre-approved keys.
The result? Institutions can securely interact with other rollups, launch tokenized assets, and meet global regulatory requirements—all on scalable, public infrastructure.
Why Enigma Matters?
Enigma upgrade lays the foundation for a future, providing the encrypted, compliant infrastructure that enterprises need to bring tokenization and real-world use cases onto blockchain networks safely and securely.
- Trust: Institutions retain full control over data access while benefiting from features unique to public infrastructure like immutability and verifiability.
- Composable by Default: Rollups on Avail will have the chance to use the built-in interoperability following the Avail Nexus upgrade (on testnet), which increases the value of the network to all participating chains.
- Future-Proof: Avail’s horizontally scalable DA layer supports infinite throughput, aligning with long-term enterprise scaling roadmaps. Avail is the first encrypted DA layer and currently the only infrastructure enabling privacy-preserving DA.
With Enigma, Avail DA enables encrypted, verifiable rollups on a global scale. The Enigma upgrade, in conjunction with Avail’s scalability and interoperability roadmap, positions Avail as the go-to solution for institutional adoption. Enigma will go live in Q2 2025, with full mainnet support targeted for Q3.
About Avail: Avail is designed to connect and scale blockchains with the Avail Stack. Designed from the ground up to horizontally scale blockchains, they provide seamless interoperability with Avail’s Nexus, DA, and Fusion, and are powered by Avail Token. Nexus connects Sovereign, ZK, and Optimistic blockchains, and infinite chains scale horizontally on Avail DA with its 10GB infinity blocks roadmap. All of this gets secured with multi-asset token staking on Fusion. Every transaction is cryptographically verifiable, even on a smartphone. With Avail, developers finally get a future-proof foundation where apps and assets move freely across chains, without fragmentation. Enterprises and developers interested in early access, integration details and partnership inquiries can connect with Kyle Rojas (kyle@availproject.org) at Avail.
Learn more about Avail on Discord, Twitter, GitHub, Blog
For more information, please visit: https://www.availproject.org/
About Encifher Labs: Encifher enables transactional and data-level privacy on-chain for blockchains via its CoProcessor (for transactional privacy) and Data Availability Adapters (for data privacy). Encifher’s CoProcessor allows application developers to work with encrypted data in their on-chain smart contracts to build use cases such as private payments, on-chain auctions, private DeFi, and more. Meanwhile, the Data Availability Adapter enables Validium-based L1/L2/L3 constructions to post data on public Data Availability layers like Avail in an encrypted manner, while retaining proper verifiability guarantees. Together, these components form a foundational privacy layer for the next generation of decentralized applications, empowering developers to build trustless, censorship-resistant systems with robust privacy by default.
