DERO — Privacy For Smart Contracts
One of my biggest concerns for humanity in the coming years is privacy. Everyday our privacy is eroded more and more. Whether it be Google knowing that we spend 3 hours a day looking at cat pictures, Facebook knowing everyone we have ever met in our life or governmental agencies knowing more about us than we do ourselves. DERO aims to solve this by creating a privacy focused smart contracts platform.
“With the increasing use of social media, as well as the Internet of Things — where everyday devices are loosely networked on the internet — society is heading towards hyper-connectivity in the digital domain. As a result, Secure Verification, Authorization, Smart Contracts and Private Payments will play an increasingly important role. However, current platforms for verification, authorization and smart contracts are either public by default or have no means of maintaining privacy. The DERO Project aims to build a decentralized blockchain which allows the people to control what details are shared with corporations and service providers, or even the public at large”
CryptoNote
DERO like a number of privacy based coins is a fork of Monero. Meaning that it is a CryptoNote based currency. However was stripped down and re-written in Golang. Being a CryptoNote based currency has a number of advantages. DEROs transactions cannot be followed on the blockchain in the same way Bitcoin is in where you are able to see who sent and received the transaction all the way down chain.
DVM
All of DEROs smart contracts will run in DERO Virtual Machine. This virtual machine will allow smart contracts to be executed while ensuring the privacy of the contracts itself. The DVM will support Golang and down the road there is a talks of Solidity support. DVM is not currently released just yet, testing is expected to begin Q2 with full release Q3.
Roadmap
DEROs roadmap is quite an ambitious one and could be huge if they manage to pull it off.
- Q2 — GUI Wallets, Subaddress, Atomic Swap Supports,
- Q3 — Smart Contract Support
- Q4 — Partnership Plannings, Enhancements
The team is also open to taking to suggestions they have an active community forum on their own forum on Reddit and Bitcoin Talk
Team
The way this team structure is set-up is one of my only major concerns with this project. The team from my understanding consists of 5 people. 3 devs 1 community manager and 1 other team member. The team is very active answering questions about the project and are constantly making blog posts about development. One piece of criticism I have is the slight lack of transparency. There is no team page on their website and I couldn’t find ant LinkedIn for any team member.
Network Attacks
There was a recent trend in crypto more specifically with CryptoNote based coins as well as other chains getting network attacked. One thing I find quite humorous is that the first thing you come across on the coins subreddit is a public challenge to network attackers to try and take down their chain. As of June 1st the chain has never even blinked. They must have some serious confidence in their project if they are willing to make public call outs like that.
In Summary
I believe this project is a real diamond in the rough only sitting at a market cap of 7 million at the time of writing. Privacy is one sector I’m super bullish on this year and DERO seems to plugging a whole in the market.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoNote
https://github.com/deroproject/documentation/blob/master/WhitePaper.md
