Secret

SCRT is the native token of the Secret Network, a privacy-preserving blockchain built on Cosmos. It employs the use of secret contracts, smart contracts that can transfer private information without exposing the encrypted data they process.

SCRT started trading on Binance on September 29, 2020, at a price of 45 cents. It sank shortly after the launch, hitting its all-time low of 25 cents the following month. The price of SCRT rose to $4.75 in April 2021, before crashing to just about 80 cents in July of that year.

SCRT’s big break in 2021 arrived in October, the month before bitcoin hit a record price of almost $70,000. On October 28, 2021, SCRT traded at its all-time high of $10.64. A subsequent period of volatility preceded a dramatic crash: SCRT fell to $3.83 in December before rising to $9.52 in January 2022. After that, its price nosedived over the next six months, sinking as low as 96 cents by June.

The Secret Network targets an annual inflation rate of about 15%. Stakers receive 85% of these rewards, and the rest fund the Secret Foundation. However, this annual inflation rate is dynamic. If less than two-thirds of SCRT’s supply is staked – locked up in the protocol by validators – the annual rate of inflation can increase to a maximum of 20%. If stakers have locked up more than two-thirds of the supply, SCRT’s annual rate of inflation can decrease to as little as 7%.

Public blockchains are great at transparency because all information, including data contained within smart contracts, is available for anyone to see. This feature is not so great for entities that need to send secret information without sacrificing decentralization.

The Secret Network is an attempt to solve this. It dedicates part of its network to the processing of secret data, then publishes confirmation of these transactions on a public blockchain.

So-called secret contracts, maintained by “secret nodes,” process sensitive information in a trusted execution environment (TEE) – a super-secure part of the network closed off from the rest of the blockchain. These nodes use Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX), the industry standard for TEEs, to handle sensitive data.

The native coin of the Secret Network, SCRT is used for staking via Tendermint, the consensus mechanism that backs Cosmos chains such as Secret. It’s also used for governance and to pay for peer-to-peer and smart-contract transactions on the Secret blockchain.

SCRT Labs was founded in 2015 by Guy Zyskind, who still serves as the Tel Aviv-based software company’s CEO. The Secret Foundation was founded by Tor Bair in 2017.

The coin was originally launched in 2017 as Enigma (ENG), a layer-2 protocol for the Ethereum blockchain. ENG holders could swap their tokens to SCRT at a rate on a 1:1 basis from June 2020 through to early 2021.

In December 2020, the Secret Foundation, the nonprofit that stewards the network, estimated that SCRT launched with an initial supply of 160 million when taking into account 114 million tokens swapped from ENG’s maximum supply of 150 million. Including the original ENG tokens, the founders kept 41.4% of the supply, investors another 46.3%, and the network allocated another 12.3% to ecosystem rewards, such as airdrops.

In February 2022, SCRT announced funding of $400 million in SCRT tokens. It comprised a $225 million ecosystem fund and a $175 million accelerator pool. Alameda Research, Arrington Capital, CoinFund and DeFiance Capital contributed funding.

In January 2022, film director Quentin Tarantino sold NFTs for “Pulp Fiction” on Secret, despite a copyright infringement lawsuit from movie studio Miramax.