This is an update from the Dero Project team dated June.24/2018.
Hello everyone,
With the tests on the public testnet concluding, we’re getting ready to move to our Atlantis mainnet very shortly. We’ve learned a lot, and made some significant improvements to the Atlantis core. For example, the core cryptography runs ~8x faster on the Atlantis testnet than the current mainnet.
Since early February we’ve been reviewing several proof-of-work algorithms, the advanced mining hardware currently available, and the costs to mount an attack. For those who may been following our various social channels with regularity you may be familiar with the number of people looking to pass the Dero code to people in the semiconductor industry, the FPGA groups, and other advanced mining hardware builders.
This means we have people looking to build advanced mining hardware like ASIC and FPGA for any new algorithm as soon as the code is available. As we’ve all seen many times, hidden and secret mining is the number one threat to any proof-of-work based blockchain. At this time we’ve decided that the best thing for a strong and secure network is to retain our current proof-of-work algorithm (CryptoNight).
While we understand this is not the original goal, the information that we’ve gathered in the last few months points to some very particular needs to keep any proof-of-work based network truly safe from hidden mining. Below are a few of the more notable points in our history that led the Dero team to our current path.
Block #9900 - Attacked on Christmas - patch is released 24 hours later and vulnerability is closed.
Block #42100 - Attacked and unexpected series of soft forks - patch is released 48 hours later with many vulnerabilities closed.
Block #53600 - Attacked - sudden early transition to golang which had significant security upgrades. This stops the attack but was an unexpected early switch to the new mainnet.
Block #57000 - A very public call out to attackers including those hitting all existing CryptoNote network, XVG, bitcoin gold, etc.
Block #68600 - Attacked & unexpected hard fork - attack from people with advanced cryptography knowledge. A 70% hashpower attack results in 6-8% of mined blocks going to the attackers with a dozen orphans or so, and no network damage.
Block #82800 - Attacked ~550 MH/s to 1.95 GH/s - 70% attack with zero issues, and the public does not notice, but it is well recorded in the blockchain history.
As stated above, we’ve learned a lot in the 6 months that we’ve been working on the Dero Project, and we’ve had to face some difficult choices. One of the most difficult was the choice to retain the original CryptoNight proof-of-work algorithm for the sake of network security. This is something we’ve reviewed meticulously, and found that this is the most appropriate way to deal with the number one threat to network security: hidden mining.
Thanks to the work of our amazing research and development team, Dero is very pleased to announce that our Atlantis mainnet upgrade will be the first blockchain anywhere with true double spend immunity, and much more. We’ve also tested against an exhaustive number of attack vectors, and we feel confident in saying that we have the most resilient blockchain anywhere in the world to date.
Today, we can see that many networks are being attacked almost daily which costs exchanges and users millions of dollars a year in malicious double spends. Due to issues like this, the Dero Project team considers security to be the number one priority, and we’ve solved many critical problems facing all blockchains today, like malicious double spends.
It’s one thing to make claims like this, and quite another to prove them. The entire Dero team would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone in the community for their patience and support. We’re now officially getting the source code ready to push for the community to thoroughly review. You can expect the source code release to trail the mainnet launch by a few days to verify that Atlantis is capable of things like the following.
True double spend immunity with full decentralization
200x+ more scalable than Monero with all the privacy, plus more, and no compromises
SSL/TLS in p2p layer (currently confirmable in other ways)
No orphan blocks
Confirmation times of less than 99 seconds on the mainnet
~9 second PoW blocks
In February 2018 the Dero research and development team started work on a theoretical new directed acyclic graph (DAG) codenamed Atlantis to be released in the currently unannounced 2019 roadmap for Q1 2019. The sophistication and regularity of the attacks dictated the path the Dero team needed to take. As such, the Q1 2019 roadmap was quietly rescheduled to Q2 2018 to create the strongest possible core for Dero, and to prevent any nefarious actors from gaining any type of foothold, or advantage.
We’re proud to say that the theoretical DAG has proven to be a success so far, and we’re confident in saying that we have the most resilient blockchain network anywhere in the world to date. However, we’ve had to readjust our 2018 roadmap to accommodate the breakthrough new DAG and blockchain technologies. The Q2 and Q3 roadmap goals are now shifted back one quarter to Q3 and Q4 respectively. Again, the decision was made to move the roadmap goals from Q1 2019 to Q2 2018 to guarantee that Dero continues to have the most resilient blockchain network by far anywhere in the world today.
Moving forward we are going to take the experiences we’ve learned from our many lessons and be particularly cautious about our timelines, and roadmap goals. We are going to take the time as a team to be very cautious about what we say in regards to the previously mention points, and strive to maintain the highest degree of professionalism possible. We’re looking forward to meeting you all in person at conferences and revealing ourselves in the not so distant future, and we’re officially preparing to release the source now that the Atlantis core is essentially complete.
Thank you again to everyone for all your support.
The Dero Project team