DERO Annual Recap

Published in

DERO

5 min readDec 31, 2019

2019

Happy holidays from the DERO team! As we celebrate this holiday season and prepare to ring in the new year, we wanted to express our gratitude for the unwavering support from our community. Your ideas, assistance, and participation does not go unnoticed, so thank you again for embodying the #privacytogether mantra. Our focus this year has been centered around upgrading the privacy and security of the Stargate release, but also methods to increase network participation and decentralization. In this summary of events, we will look at community participation, development tracking, information related to the DERO Project, and revisit some of the goals that we met, wanted to meet, and those that were either infeasible or needed to be pushed into 2020.

A Reflection of 2019

In 2019, the DERO team had achieved some of the major milestones that were stated since the project’s inception, but there were also some that we could not achieve, and some that will come in the upcoming year.

Achievements

Created the not-for-profit foundation to administer many aspects of the project.
Listed the project on larger exchanges.
Increased exposure with the help of notable industry players, mining pools, and community efforts.
Advanced our technological ambitions to research new ways to increase the privacy and security of our platform.
Set in motion several initiatives to help drive adoption.
Security audit performed by the SlowMist team.

What We Missed

Many of our roadmap goals were deemed impractical, or are pending due to security concerns or prioritization of protocol-level advancements.
Did not meet the estimated timeline of some releases.
Communication.

Due to the privacy and security mandates initially set for the project, we felt it was necessary to delay the Stargate release (private smart contracts) in order to improve upon the privacy of applications that will be deployed on our platform. With the addition of Full Homomorphic Encrypted Smart Contracts, DERO will achieve an unprecedented level of privacy and security, which has always been the goal of the project. We will do so with as much transparency as possible.

While the project has become more transparent compared to the previous year, we felt that there is still some communication that was missed. There are plans to increase communication for 2020 and much to experiment with when private smart contracts go live on our mainnet. There is still much work to be done before we get to this point, so please be patient as we continue to work toward privacy together.

Some of the research or development items that were explored did not provide suitable results to meet our security or privacy standards. Below is a brief summary of our findings:

RandomX
https://medium.com/deroproject/analysis-of-randomx-dde9dfe9bbc6

While the RandomX algorithm has been successful for some projects, there were security risks that prevented its use on the DERO network.

Omniring
https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/580.pdf

The team was not able to implement a working version of Omniring based upon the paper linked above.

Even though we did not see any tangible progress from these topics, the work and research completed has led us to our current pipeline. There is no doubt that the project as a whole will benefit from this as we move forward to bring Stargate to mainnet.

If you would like to view our previous project updates, please click on the link below:

https://medium.com/deroproject/updates/home

DERO 2020

Proof of Work

The team is working on a custom algorithm that will enable CPU-only mining on the DERO network. This variant requires high memory utilization and many other methods that will remove or limit specialized mining hardware and botnets. With this algorithm, we hope that we will further decentralize the network and provide better access to mining rewards, which will fuel applications built on our platform. We hope to release more information about this algorithm in the short-term.

Digital Presence

We have decided to extend the Phase 3 development of our digital presence package to Q1 of 2020. This will not only allow us to have a more suitable format for disseminating information about our platform, but also to allow some time for us to include more information about the many suggestions provided by the community. Our aim is to provide a centralized knowledgebase to better serve developers and users alike.

Current Progress

Phase 1: Logomark (Done)
Phase 2: Motion and Sonic Branding (Done)
Phase 3: Web and Print Design (In Progress)
Phase 4: Early Q1 2020 Deployment

What is left for Phase 3? We need to lock-down the design templates, motion graphics, documentation templates, and revision of platform-specific informational updates.

Stargate

As discussed previously, the team has stated that Full Homomorphic Encrypted Smart Contracts (FHE-SC) will officially be deployed with the Stargate mainnet release. In addition, community input has been requested regarding the DERO Virtual Machine (DVM) on the project github. To view or add suggestions, please visit the link below:

https://github.com/deroproject/DIPS/issues/1

Testnet

The Stargate Testnet is back up. For those that would like to get started on application development, or wish to play with smart contracts, you can look here for more information:

deroproject/documentation

Download Dero Stargate testnet source and binaries. Dero Virtual Machine Examples of other Dero Smart Contracts Start…

github.com

Additionally, a mining pool has been set up by the community if you choose to mine your own testnet coins, but you can also reach out to community members in the #stargate Discord channel to request coins.

Primary Pool:
http://40.121.177.232:8080/

Secondary Pool:
http://104.210.209.8:8080/

You can also access the daemon of each pool remotely at the following addresses:

Primary Daemon:
40.121.177.232:30306

Secondary Daemon:
104.210.209.8:30306