Dero Project update - July.9/2018

This is an update from the Dero Project team dated July.9/2018.

Hello everyone,

There has been a lot going on with the Dero Project, and we’re very excited to share with you some of what we’ve been up to these last few weeks. There has been a new Dero mainnet upgrade that brings new cutting edge technology to the blockchain, we’ve made great progress starting the Dero Foundation, the Dero GUI wallet is coming, and perhaps as important as anything, the Dero project team have reviewed our methods of communicating with the community.

Dero’s new technology and mainnet upgrade

As many of you already know in detail, and for those who may not, the Dero Project recently upgraded our network to a new mainnet (codenamed: Atlantis). The Dero team are pleased to announce that this upgrade brings dramatically improved security, scalability, reliability, speed, and several firsts in the field of blockchain technology. Thanks to our exceptionally supportive community, and the hard work of our developers, we were able to thoroughly stress test, and debug our new blockchain technology across multiple private and public testnets.

During our testing we were able to effectively push our new blockchain technology up to 75 transactions per second (75 TPS) while utilizing the full feature set (including privacy) of the CryptoNote protocol. One of the two key ways we accomplished a 20,000% (200x) scalability increase over the current implementations of the CryptoNote core was through the use of a new cutting edge blockchain technology that we named “Dero-DAG”. The second key improvement was to the core cryptography itself from the CryptoNote protocol. Dero’s core CryptoNote cryptography runs ~8x faster than the original core, and our bulletproof implementation is operating ~3x faster than the originally proposed version of bulletproofs.

Dero-DAG is a linear proof-of-work based directed acyclic graph (DAG) that brings several very large improvements to current existing blockchain technology. One of the most notable areas of improvement, and one that we never lose focus on, is security. For example, Dero-DAG is (to the best of our knowledge) the only completely decentralized blockchain with true double spend immunity. This key technology has allowed Dero to turn many disadvantages on other networks (like soft forks) into strengths as they now provide additional security to Dero.

A commitment to high quality communication and transparency

Some people say a day in the real world is equivalent to a year in the world of blockchain. Given the massive influx of brilliant minds into this field, the point of blockchain technology in its adoption cycle, and our first wave of substantial regulations of the field, it’s not unreasonable to say that things feel as though they move almost as rapidly as the hyperbole from the first line in this paragraph would suggest.

With the extensive amount of effort our research and development team have put into our new cutting edge blockchain technology it’s like we have our own small version of “a day in the real world is equivalent to a year in the world of Dero”. As such, it can be very difficult to discern what information to provide to the community, and when.

We spent the time to review all of our communication history from day 1, and identified a number of areas where we can and will improve. The entire Dero Project team understands the importance of excellent communication, transparency, and positive community relations. We would like to offer our collective apologies for not realizing recently the scale of our communication issues. It would be reasonable to state that the Dero Project tends to learn from any bugs in the system, and this is no exception. Any communication issues that you may see will be addressed with the same seriousness we would approach other critical problems with.

Moving forward our team will be taking the initiative to reach out to the community to provide significantly more information about the project, development, and we’re going to make our developers generally more available. Having said that, the community is able to start looking forward to Dero developer AMA (ask me anything) style conversations that we will try to schedule somewhat regularly. This should provide the community with a regular, and ongoing opportunity to have their concerns addressed by the team. We also plan to document and post all of the AMA conversations for people to review at their convenience.

We would like to emphasize that this is a small portion of the effort we will be making to improve communication and transparency. If you have any feedback or suggestions for ways to improve communication please feel free to email Serena at serena@dero.io or Mojo at mojo@dero.io

The Dero Foundation, source code, and developer reveal

As a project with long term goals, the Dero team have initiated the process of forming a foundation that will oversee the governance, and development of the Dero Project. We anticipate that the Dero Foundation will be formed in approximately one month, and with the foundation we can expect to see a Dero developer reveal. The details surrounding the Dero Foundation will be released in a future update.

Currently Dero has three (3) full time developers, of which two (2), including the Dero lead developer, will be revealing their identities with the launch of the Dero Foundation. The Dero Atlantis source code release will happen essentially in conjunction with the launch of the Dero Foundation, and we have already released the Dero core cryptography for audit. When we have more details regarding the audit of Dero’s core cryptography we will inform the community without delay.

Quarter 3 - 2018

Looking towards Dero’s Q3/2018 goals for a moment, we can see the following are listed: GUI wallets, subaddress support, atomic swap, smart contracts testing.

We’re pleased to announce that the Dero GUI wallets should be available by early August, or more likely late July. Additionally, we’ve heavily upgraded subaddress support to shadow address support which we anticipate will be available in Q3/2018 or early Q4/2018. The Dero research and development team are not taking Atomic Swaps off the table. We are however taking some time to review a technology that may prove to be superior that serves the same purpose. When we have more details in this area we will promptly update the community.

Which brings us to smart contract testing. At the time of this update the Dero Virtual Machine, and smart contract testing are still on schedule for Q3/2018. After the first iteration of the Dero GUI wallets are completed we expect to be able to start providing the community with updates related to Dero smart contract and DVM development.

Marketing and a minimum viable product (MVP)

With the advent of Dero’s minimum viable product (Atlantis) we feel that it’s an appropriate time to start pursuing marketing, and showcasing Dero’s technology to the world. With that being said, we can’t provide any further details until we finalize everything, but we can say with certainty that it will be a formidable effort.

For more information about the Dero Project, or to speak with the team, please feel free to contact us at any of the following.

support@dero.io - The Dero team general email