DERO
Privacy Together
Ten Times Faster Than Regular Bulletproofs.
While a typical Bulletproof takes ~15 ms to verify, Dero’s Rocket Bulletproofs only take ~1.5 ms.
Bulletproofs are a cryptographic technique that reduce the space needed for zero-knowledge range proofs in anonymous transactions. In anonymous transactions, the exact amounts are hidden, but the network still has to make sure that the transaction is valid (e.g. no coins are generated out of thin air).
For this, commitments to values are used in anonymous transactions. The most important one is the Pedersen commitment, which proves that the outputs of a transaction are not larger than the inputs. However, there is a method to fool the Pedersen commitment by using very large numbers for the transaction outputs that lead to overflowing. To avoid this, range proofs are used, which prove that the outputs lie in a certain range of values.
Range proofs have a size of ~4 kilobytes for 64 bits of precision, with Bulletproofs the proof size is only 672 bytes, which greatly reduces the blockchain size.
But not only the size, also the speed of the verification of the proof is important as transactions are processed by the network. For this, the Dero team studied the existing Bulletproof implementations and managed to increase the performance by a factor of ten.
The Dero engineers achieved this by optimizing the double-base double-scalar multiplications that are necessary for validating bulletproofs. Dero Atlantis uses pre-compute tables to convert 64*2 Base Scalar multiplications into doublings and additions.
The Dero Project is building a blockchain network that will be used by thousands of businesses across the globe. Therefore, the security of the network is of highest importance. Unencrypted communication via HTTP posses a risk for privacy, security and integrity of the network participants. Dero is the first blockchain project to use TLS encryption for its network communication, which protects the network participants from eavesdropping and tampering of network data.
TLS secures data transfers by using asymmetric encryption techniques to generate a shared secret key. The shared key is then used for the symmetric encryption of messages, which is faster than asymmetric encryption. The encrypted messages are unreadable for someone who is spying on the network.
The Dero team also keeps future large scale applications in mind, e.g. enterprise servers which handle thousands of clients per second. They are continuously working on making the network even faster to accomplish this goal. For the encrypted network, they performed benchmarks and ended up choosing ECDSA instead of RSA as method for key generation as it allows for a higher number of handshakes per second.
The project was launched in December 2017 comprising a team of three full-time Developers. The core team members each have over a decade of experience in cryptography and multiple years of experience in blockchain development.
The first significant milestone was reached in March 2018 when the developers implemented a world-first: a complete re-write of the CryptoNote protocol in Golang. This programming language was chosen because it has a high degree of immunity to security vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows and dangling pointers.
In April 2018, the Dero network migrated to the Golang code base without a single second of downtime. The migration of the code base coincided with a number of sophisticated attacks on CryptoNote based coins. Dero core team studied how the attacks were implemented and designed a new type of blockchain that is resistant to 51% hashrate attacks and softforks.
The Dero project unveiled this new blockchain technology in June 2018, codenamed “Atlantis”. It combines the Cryptonote protocol with directed acyclic graph and Bulletproofs. However, these are not just any Bulletproofs, but what have been coined Rocket Bulletproofs, leading to blocktimes of just a few seconds. In a controlled environment, the Atlantis network can achieve blocktimes as low as three seconds processing a thousand transactions per second. A world wide testnet was launched with a nine-second blocktime which allowed for extensive tests of the new technology.
July 2018 saw the successful and flawless migration of the Dero network to the new Atlantis codebase with a twelve-second block time and two minute confirmation time. This is by far the fastest CryptoNote based blockchain ever deployed, with up to 75 transactions per second. A relatively longer twelve second block time was chosen so that people in locations with sub-optimal network connectivity could still participate in the network. The Dero team plans to reduce the blocktime further in coming years, as network infrastructure improves around the world.
With a ground-breaking minimum viable product established by August 2018, just eight months after conception, the Dero team initiated applications for listings on major exchanges. A bold new marketing initiative is in the process of being established, with a primary focus on professional and business users and developers. An advisory team drawn from and representing the wider Dero community has been formed, and a new Dero Foundation that will support the aims of the Dero Project is in the process of being formed.
On Feb 15th 2020 we announced the release of our new mining algorithm AstroBWT. AstroBWT is an open source proof-of-work that was based on one-CPU-one-vote. With help from the data transformation algorithm, Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT), we are able to reduce the performance advantage of specialized hardware, fairly distribute mining rewards, and come to a majority decision via CPU power from our network of nodes.
The scheduled hard fork to bring AstroBWT to our mainnet was completed successfully on Mar 6th 2020. After handling massive amounts of hashing power and soft forks the DERO BlockDAG resumed normal operation, completely powered by CPU miners from around the world.
Private Smart Contracts have now launched with DVM on our testnet and these will be live on the Dero mainnet ny the end of Q2 2020.
View our future Roadmap Roadmap
The team is pleased to introduce our new proof-of-work mining algorithm that aims to reduce the performance advantage of GPU, ASIC, and FPGA hardware to allow for competitive CPU mining. With the help of notable data transformation algorithm, Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT), we are able to reduce the performance advantage of specialized hardware and fairly distribute mining rewards.
The main points to AstroBWT are; Long key sizes and iterations to reduce FPGA performance, random numbers to hinder GPU parallel processing and dynamic and new operations with longer computation cycles to reduce ASIC performance.
We released AstroBWT to our mainnet on March 6, 2020 ~0200 GMT (Block: 4550555). ASIC, GPU, and FPGA developers are welcome and encouraged to develop hardware-specific implementations for our algorithm.
To mine DERO you will need a wallet address. Please visit https://wallet.dero.io and create a DERO wallet and save your seed in a safe place.
You will also need to download mining software, which can connect your mining system to DERO network and the DERO mining pool.
DERO is currently mineable with any CPU and GPU, for help with setting up mining please visit: - https://medium.com/deroproject/how-to-mine-dero-with-cpu-on-windows-b80e07ec196a
Please see below list of mining pools that support DERO mining.
Any question? Reach out to us and we'll get back to you shortly.
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