🇸🇦 العربية 🇩🇪 Deutsch 🇬🇷 Ελληνικά 🇺🇸 English 🇪🇸 Español 🇫🇮 Suomi 🇫🇷 Français 🇮🇳 हिन्दी 🇮🇹 Italiano 🇯🇵 日本語 🇰🇷 한국어 🇳🇱 Nederlands 🇳🇴 Norsk 🇵🇱 Polski 🇧🇷 Português 🇷🇺 Русский 🇸🇪 Svenska 🇵🇭 Filipino 🇹🇷 Türkçe 🇻🇳 Tiếng Việt 🇨🇳 中文

What Is Secret Network?

Secret Network (ticker SCRT) is a layer-1 blockchain designed for privacy-preserving smart contracts. On most blockchains, every piece of contract data is public; on Secret Network, smart contracts (called "secret contracts") execute inside trusted execution environments (TEEs), secure hardware enclaves based on Intel SGX, so the contract's inputs, outputs, and internal state stay encrypted even from the nodes running them. This makes it possible to build applications like private token balances, sealed-bid auctions, and confidential voting that are difficult or impossible on transparent chains.

The project grew out of Enigma, a privacy protocol founded by Guy Zyskind and Can Kisagun based on research from the MIT Media Lab, where Zyskind co-authored the 2015 Enigma whitepaper on decentralized computation with guaranteed privacy. Enigma MPC raised about $45 million in a 2017 sale of its Ethereum-based ENG token. In February 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission settled charges with Enigma MPC for conducting an unregistered securities offering; the company agreed to pay a $500,000 penalty, register ENG as a security, and offer refunds to investors through a claims process. Around the same time, the project launched a new proof-of-stake mainnet, and in May 2020 the community voted on-chain to rebrand it as Secret Network. ENG holders could swap their tokens 1:1 for SCRT through a burn contract that opened in June 2020, and privacy-preserving secret contracts went live on mainnet in September 2020, a first for any blockchain.

Technically, Secret Network is built with the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint-style proof-of-stake consensus, making it interoperable with the wider Cosmos ecosystem through IBC. Secret contracts are written in Rust using a privacy-extended version of the CosmWasm smart contract toolkit. A network-wide encryption scheme, anchored by a shared "consensus seed" held inside validators' secure enclaves, keeps contract state encrypted on-chain while still allowing any validator to execute contracts and verify results. Users can grant selective access to their private data through viewing keys and permits, so privacy is programmable rather than absolute.

SCRT is the network's native coin, used to pay gas fees, stake with validators to secure the chain, and vote in on-chain governance. SCRT has no maximum supply; new coins are issued through inflation to fund staking rewards, with the inflation rate adjusting based on how much of the supply is bonded. Circulating supply is in the hundreds of millions of SCRT. The network also supports SNIP-20 tokens, privacy-preserving tokens whose balances and transfers are encrypted.

Secret Network's reliance on trusted hardware is both its key feature and its most debated weakness. In 2022, security researchers showed that the ÆPIC leak, an Intel CPU vulnerability disclosed that August, could be used on SGX machines to extract Secret Network's consensus seed, the master key protecting the chain's private state. The researchers disclosed the issue privately in October 2022; the team froze new node registrations, worked with Intel, and deployed a network upgrade in November 2022 to block vulnerable machines. The team said no evidence of exploitation by outsiders was found, but the episode demonstrated that TEE-based privacy inherits the security of the underlying hardware, and the network has since added defenses such as seed rotation and stricter node attestation.

The project has also weathered governance turmoil. Through 2022, the community pressed the Secret Foundation, a separate entity led by Tor Bair that handled marketing and ecosystem growth, for financial transparency. In January 2023, SCRT Labs founder Guy Zyskind publicly alleged that the foundation had sold a large amount of SCRT over the counter in late 2021 and that Bair had taken roughly $2.6 million of the proceeds as a personal dividend without disclosure, alongside an earlier OTC deal lost to a scammer. The dispute prompted validator departures and community outrage, and Bair left the foundation in 2023. Core development continued under SCRT Labs, which appointed Alex Zaidelson as CEO in August 2023, with Zyskind shifting to focus on research and development.

In recent years Secret Network has repositioned itself around confidential computing more broadly. Its Secret AI and SecretVM products let developers run AI workloads, such as large language model inference, and general virtual machines inside trusted execution environments, including NVIDIA GPU-based confidential computing, with cryptographic attestation that the code and data stayed private. The pitch is that the same TEE expertise behind secret contracts can serve the growing demand for verifiable, private AI.

Getting Started With Secret Network

Getting started with Secret Network usually means holding SCRT in a Cosmos-compatible wallet and exploring its privacy-preserving apps:

  1. Step 1: Set up a compatible wallet. Keplr, Leap, and StarShell all support Secret Network.
  2. Step 2: Acquire SCRT on a centralized or decentralized exchange and withdraw it to your wallet.
  3. Step 3: Stake (delegate) your SCRT to a validator to help secure the network and earn inflation rewards, and vote on governance proposals.
  4. Step 4: Explore privacy apps on the network, such as Shade Protocol for private DeFi, or try the Secret Dashboard to wrap SCRT into its private SNIP-20 form.

How to Get a Secret Network Wallet?

SCRT lives on a Cosmos SDK chain, so Cosmos ecosystem wallets are the most direct way to hold, stake, and use it.

Keplr

Keplr is the most widely used Cosmos wallet, available as a browser extension and mobile app. It supports Secret Network natively, including staking, governance voting, and interacting with secret contracts via viewing keys.

Leap Wallet

Leap is another popular Cosmos wallet with browser extension and mobile versions, offering built-in staking and a clean interface for managing SCRT.

StarShell

StarShell is a privacy-oriented wallet built specifically for Secret Network, designed around the network's encrypted tokens and permissions.

Hardware Wallets

Ledger devices support SCRT and can be paired with Keplr for offline key storage, which is recommended for larger holdings and long-term staking.

Secret Network Resources

How to Buy Secret Network?

SCRT is available on both centralized and decentralized exchanges.

Centralized Exchanges

SCRT is listed on major exchanges including Binance, Kraken, Bybit, KuCoin, HTX, and Gate, typically traded against USDT or BTC.

Decentralized Exchanges

Within the Cosmos ecosystem, SCRT trades on Osmosis and on Shade Protocol, a privacy-focused DeFi suite built on Secret Network itself. Wrapped versions of SCRT have also traded on Ethereum DEXes such as Uniswap and SushiSwap via bridges.

Latest Secret Network News

Secret Network's recent direction is a pivot from privacy-only smart contracts toward confidential computing as a product. SCRT Labs' 2026 roadmap centers on Secret AI and SecretVM, services for running AI models and virtual machines inside trusted execution environments on Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA hardware, with plans for multi-cloud deployment and high-availability SecretVM clusters. The team has also integrated Intel Trust Authority attestation into SecretVM so every workload is verified by default.

On the layer-1 side, the network continues hardening its TEE security model after past hardware vulnerabilities, including deprecating end-of-life CPUs, rotating encryption seeds, and working toward reducing its dependence on any single enclave technology. Because staking rates, inflation parameters, and the product lineup change over time, the official website, documentation, and governance forum are the best sources for the current state of the network.