July 2020
The purpose of this update is to provide a collection of information regarding our upcoming and highly anticipated release codenamed Stargate. For those of whom are joining us for the first time, we recommend that you read about our previously released blockchain innovations located in past monthly updates. The DERO Project is aiming to create a platform for developers to deploy secure, open, scalable, and privacy-preserving decentralized applications. DERO is unique because we value security and privacy above all else; as a result, users are able to transact privately over our network without fear of common protocol-level and network attacks. Additionally, our technology preserves transparency where required and scales with network load, which provides an ideal environment for business-class applications.
Stargate is our flagship release. It creates an ecosystem that combines many of our previous innovations, including a new fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) blockchain protocol, dubbed DERO Homomorphic Encryption Blockchain Protocol (DHEBP). This means that DERO will be saying farewell to the CryptoNote family and venturing into paths unknown. Below, we will be discussing some of the major changes that you will see during public testing, and explore some of the concepts that led to the creation of the Stargate ecosystem.
Protocol Changes
As we continue to advance beyond our Atlantis release, we wanted to provide a quick list of the features that contribute to the new protocol.
- Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) Protocol
- Private on-chain Smart Contracts
- Turing complete 256-bit virtual machine
- Truly private transactions
- Account-based transaction system
- Fixed transaction sizes < 3 KB
- Instant transaction verification
- Instant wallet synchronization
- New robust database
DERO Homomorphic Encryption Blockchain Protocol (DHEBP)
The DERO network is already using a new proof-of-work algorithm named AstroBWT for economic decentralization, our novel BlockDAG to provide scalability, and a robust client protocol for transaction settlement. DHEBP will take blockchain privacy to the next level by introducing homomorphic operations on encrypted data throughout the ecosystem, including on-chain smart contracts. For example, encrypted account balances can be updated (added or subtracted) without decrypting the balances first. Additionally, DHEBP will employ an account-based transaction system, which greatly decreases the time to settle balances.
We recently released the DHEBP proof-of-concept code that demonstrated how quickly transactions with an anonymity set of 64 (and beyond) are able to instantly and homomorphically settle, which also have a small block footprint relative to the anonymity set (ring size). The size of each transaction is primarily determined by the level of privacy and many-out-of-many proofs, which are built using Bulletproofs and Σ-Protocol.
The two key parts of every transaction are:
- Transaction Statement
- Transaction Proof
The transaction statement includes the keys of each member in the anonymity set, commitments, and encrypted balances, which grow linearly. Alternatively, the transaction proof shows logarithmic growth. In other words, each time the anonymity set doubles (increasing the desired level of privacy), the size of the transaction proof increases by a fixed amount as shown within the benchmarks below:
Ring size, Transaction size (fixed)2 1669 bytes ( 328 byte statement, 1341 bytes proof )
4 2261 bytes ( 592 byte statement, 1669 bytes proof )
8 3117 bytes ( 1120 byte statement, 1997 bytes proof )
16 4501 bytes ( 2176 byte statement, 2325 bytes proof )
32 6941 bytes ( 4288 byte statement, 2653 bytes proof )
64 11493 bytes ( 8512 byte statement, 2981 bytes proof )
128 20269 bytes ( 16960 byte statement, 3309 bytes proof )
256 37493 bytes ( 33856 byte statement, 3637 bytes proof )
512 71613 bytes ( 67648 byte statement, 3965 bytes proof )
In our Atlantis release (currently on mainnet), transactions with an anonymity set of five members will average < 3 kilobytes. Efficiency is where Stargate RC2 will deliver by keeping the proof size small when larger anonymity sets are required. As shown in the table above, our new protocol enables variable ring sizes for any desired level of privacy. Additional advancements that we will see in the Stargate release include instant wallet synchronization, fixed transaction sizes, and a new robust database written from scratch. It should also be noted that all of this is achieved without any trusted setups or hidden parameters.
Included Resources
Σ-protocols
https://www.cs.au.dk/~ivan/Sigma.pdf
Many-out-of-Many Proofs with Applications to Anonymous Zether
https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/293
Zether: Towards Privacy in a Smart Contract World
https://crypto.stanford.edu/~buenz/papers/zether.pdf
DHEBP POC
https://git.dero.io/Captain/DHEBP
Stargate RC2
The original release of Stargate RC1 included the testing of CryptoNote on-chain smart contracts, DERO Virtual Machine (DVM), and our new language named DVM-BASIC. The DVM features a turing complete 256-bit virtual machine and supports DVM-BASIC, which was designed to be easy to learn, read and audit. The current version of DVM is an interpreter-based system to avoid security vulnerabilities and compiler back-doors. In the example shown below, it should be quite apparent that this new language is influenced by GW-BASIC, Visual Basic and C.
' This is a comment in DVM-BASIC
// This comment is supported
/* This is a multi-line comment */
Function Factorial(s Uint64) Uint64 // this is a comment
10 DIM result, scopy as Uint64 /* this is also comment */
15 LET scopy = s
20 LET result = 1
30 LET result = result * s
40 LET s = s - 1
50 IF s >= 2 THEN GOTO 30
60 PRINTF "FACTORIAL of %d = %d" scopy result
70 RETURN result
End FunctionThe success of the RC1 testnet demonstrated some interesting use cases. In its wake, the RC2 release will include all of the benefits of DHEBP, since all smart contracts execute from and reside on the base layer of the BlockDAG. It will also retain DVM-BASIC and the DVM, but with some changes to conform to the new protocol. The current focus is to bring Stargate RC2 to a public testnet , so we hope to see your creative minds at work soon. In the meantime, please see some of the previously tested community projects:
Peppinux/dero-marketplace
Built for the Dero Smart Contract build competition Testnet SCID…
github.com
Privacy together.
