Enigma litepaper

Publication status: recommended draft for board and legal review before publication.

Enigma is provider-neutral AI memory and proof infrastructure. It gives people, developers, and organizations a portable memory layer for AI: local-first or customer-controlled vaults, Memory Passports, scoped context injection, and signed receipts for Enigma-mediated memory lifecycle and boundary events.

The simple idea: AI should remember useful context without trapping that context inside one model provider, one app, or one cloud account. Enigma is the memory card for AI.

Why Enigma exists

AI is moving from one-off chats to long-running work with people, teams, tools, and agents. That creates a new infrastructure problem:

• personal and team context is fragmented across subscriptions, apps, exports, vector stores, and agent stacks;
• developers rebuild memory, retrieval, import/export, and audit logic for every agent;
• enterprises need evidence of what was remembered, retrieved, injected, denied, exported, or tombstoned;
• provider-native memory is useful, but it should not be the only system of record for durable user or enterprise context.

Enigma makes memory portable and accountable without exposing raw memory and without asking users to trust a dashboard as the only record.

What Enigma provides

Memory Passport

A Memory Passport is a portable package for AI context. It is designed to move across clients, models, and agent workflows while preserving custody and evidence.

Local-first vault

A user or enterprise can keep the canonical memory vault locally or inside customer-controlled infrastructure. Enigma can connect that vault to assistants through CLI, MCP, browser, desktop, relay, gateway, and enterprise policy surfaces.

Concrete local path from the Enigma docs:

cd enigma
npm install -g .
enigma init --bundle ./.enigma/bundle.json --subject local-user --display-name "Local user"
enigma remember --bundle ./.enigma/bundle.json --text "Prefers concise release notes." --purpose user_memory --tags preference
enigma context --bundle ./.enigma/bundle.json --query "release notes" --purpose local_answer --out ./.enigma/context-pack.json
enigma export --bundle ./.enigma/bundle.json --out ./.enigma/export.json
enigma verify --bundle ./.enigma/export.json

MCP installability

Enigma can run as an MCP stdio server so MCP-capable assistants can use a local vault:

ENIGMA_BUNDLE="$HOME/.enigma/bundle.json" enigma-mcp

Generic MCP entry:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "enigma": {
      "command": "enigma-mcp",
      "args": [],
      "env": {
        "ENIGMA_BUNDLE": "/absolute/path/to/.enigma/bundle.json"
      }
    }
  }
}

Receipts and verifier

Enigma emits signed receipts for declared Enigma-mediated operations such as create, retrieve, context-pack, deny, export, tombstone, and boundary decisions. Receipts are designed to verify offline.

Receipts prove that declared Enigma-mediated operations were signed, ordered, and committed under a stated policy boundary. They do not prove factual truth, model intent, uninstrumented side-channel absence, or deletion from external systems unless those systems provide independent evidence.

What Enigma does not claim

Enigma does not claim that a closed provider deleted internal data, that model weights forgot, that provider-native memory disappeared, or that every side channel is absent. Enigma proves facts about Enigma-controlled vault state, receipts, checkpoints, and declared boundary operations.

Raw memories, prompts, embeddings, ACLs, and personal metadata should never leave their encrypted boundary. Relay and witness infrastructure handle only encrypted records, commitments, receipt identifiers, opaque roots, and service metadata.

The optional Enigma network

The core local product must remain useful without a token. The optional Enigma network is for shared infrastructure roles that may need coordination:

• Relays route or store encrypted memory capsules and opaque relay records.
• Witnesses attest receipt roots, checkpoint batches, and protocol events without seeing plaintext memory.
• Gateways provide policy and settlement entry points for applications, enterprises, and developers.
• Verifiers inspect receipt bundles and confirm the stated evidence.

Relay and gateway commands from the current docs:

enigma relay demo
enigma relay serve --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8787
enigma gateway demo
enigma gateway serve --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8797

Roadmap posture

1. Local memory and receipts: install, create a vault, use MCP, export and verify proof bundles.
2. Developer and enterprise adoption: connectors, SDKs, policy gateway, import/export, receipt schemas, and audit bundles.
3. Network testnet: relays, witnesses, gateways, operator rules, service units, challenge flows, and opaque checkpoint anchoring.

Enigma leads with proof. The product story is portable AI memory with verifiable Enigma-mediated events, with optional network coordination for infrastructure participants.