The Dero Redpill for Monero Enthusiasts: Don’t Let Disinformation Rooted in Old Rivalries Gatekeep You From Dero
The vast and varied ground campaigns by corporations (and government agencies) to corner individuals into accepting as inevitable the surveillance of their lives for the sake of others’ improved control of them, makes adoption of DEROHE one of the few, if not the only, positive actions possible. If you’re active in the Monero community you’ve been exposed to a concerted but disingenuous disinformation campaign against Dero. The roots of this campaign lay in past rivalry between the two projects, a rivalry most newcomers are not aware of.
Before I break down and refute one by one the talking points of the anti-DERO rhetoric fed to Monero enthusiasts, here is a quick rundown of the Dero tech and why it matters. To start with, today DeroHE (launched in Q1 2022) is the first and only L1 to use homomorphic encryption, a tech considered to be the holy grail for privacy because data is at no point decrypted. DeroHE uses El Gamal for homomorphic encryption operations, thanks to which all balances are updated in encrypted state. This feature alone makes Dero NSA proof, because to follow the flow of money one would have to break encryption. Dero also has its own Virtual Machine. On top of the homomorphically encrypted L1 one can build native dapps such as DeroDEX, a fully functioning Uniswap style dex ($480k TVL at the time of writing); or DeroNFTs, an NFT marketplace that has done around 2400 DERO (≈$15k) in volume in the past 24h. All users of Dero dapps have native access to the underlying homomorphically encrypted peer-to-peer cash, without any on or off-ramps required. This adds to the antifragility of Dero’s DeFi because on-ramps are used as chokepoints by malevolent government or corporate forces.
DeroHE also has a powerful disintermediation tool built in its client that makes the blockchain and its smart contracts indexable, browseable and searchable directly by each user node. The piece of tech that does this is called Gnomon and was custom made for Dero. Thanks to Gnomon, users do not have to trust blockchain data providers like Infura.
Then there is the heart of Dero, the Graviton DB. This is a masterpiece on its own created just for DeroHE’s needs. Graviton is Dero’s database, it is where all account balances are stored in encrypted state. One can think of Graviton as a bank but contrary to banks that can know/guess the balance of each account, Graviton updates balances in encrypted state and entirely based on cryptographic proofs. What truly makes Graviton Dero’s beating heart is that it’s capable of storing the uncompiled code in it, removing the need for a centralised code source. As result, the entire network can be restored from a single node copy making it impossible for a state actor to censor Dero even if they shut down the entire internet.
DERO’s mining algo is the most egalitarian mining algorithm in crypto today. Egalitarian means that anyone on any device can download the Dero client and mine at an advantageous cost per watt compared to those using specialised hardware like GPUs or FPGAs. Being CPU mineable adds to Dero’s censorship resistance since it makes its mining undetectable.
By way of example and not limitation, I’ve listed some of the most salient DEROHE features and innovations to show how DeroHE integrates novel cutting-edge tech that effectively make it the ultimate frontier to freedom. As such, I think it is crucial to protect the most powerful privacy tech of our time from the tendrils of disinformation rooted in old rivalries and animosities.
1) “DERO WAS A MONERO FORK, TEAM LIED THAT ATLANTIS WAS CODED FROM SCRATCH”
Dero’s first iteration was called Atlantis, it was based on the Cryptonote protocol. First, Monero is a fork of Bytecoin. Bytecoin was the original Cryptonote coin, not Monero. Second, Dero Atlantis was not a Cryptonote fork because it was coded from scratch in Golang although the consensus was based on the Cryptonote protocol. A fork is when you use existing code and add to it, coding everything from scratch in a completely different language requires a deep understanding of the tech. In the screenshot below you can read a testimony from a developer that bought Dero early on who explains the challenges of coding Dero from the ground up in Golang.
Worth noting here is how Dero released rocket bullet proofs before Monero in 2018. The Rocket bulletproof code released by DERO caused XMR to delay their bulletproofs and fix the security holes found in their audit. No weaknesses/bugs were found in the DERO Rocket Bulletproofs as discussed in Monero original Bulletproofs audit report. Also, there was a double wallet accounting bug in Monero and other CryptoNote forks, except of DERO. In a funny twist, instead of acknowledging the superior work of Dero devs, this event was turned into lie number 3 on which I expand below.
2) “DERO STOLE ZETHER CODE, IT DOES NOT USE HOMOMORPHIC ENCRYPTION”
Zether is a blockchain layer 2, it was a protocol for transacting cheaper on Ethereum. Dero is an HE blockchain. Dero builds on Zether’s transacting model, improves over it, and integrates it in an L1. This was never hidden and has been stated by Captain multiple times in Dero’s Discord. Below is a screenshot.
3) “DERO ONCE IMPLEMENTED UNAUDITED BULLETPROOF CODE”
DERO Rocket Bulletproofs were released on DERO (Atlantis) mainnet on 07/4/2018, before the Monero audit reports were published. See detailed timeline here. A Github issue was opened and later deleted asking why Dero’s bulletproofs were not compatible with Monero’s. It came out that Monero’s bulletproofs had a bug.
4) “DERO FALSELY CLAIMS (or CLAIMED) TO BE 51% ATTACK RESISTANT”
Atlantis was a DAG and as such it was 51% resistant. Screenshots of descriptions referring to Dero as 51% resistant are taken out of context from the Atlantis documentation. DeroHE is not 51% resistant and never made such claim. Below is a screenshot of Captain, the core team Discord account, spelling this out in July 2022.
5) “DERO LIES ABOUT AUDITABLE SUPPLY”
In DeroHE supply is auditable thanks to homomorphic encryption. Starting supply is hard coded into the genesis block, it can be viewed in the code. All supply changes since genesis (miner rewards/emission) is hard coded into each block when accepted by the network and these amounts are auditable/summable. In other privacy coins this is not possible because they do not use homomorphic encryption, so operations on encrypted data are not possible.
6) “DERO WAS CREATED WITH COMPLIANCE IN MIND” (referring to image below)
As previously explained the first iteration of Dero was based on the Cryptonote protocol. The kyc/view key part from the old whitepaper applied to Atlantis and still applies to all cryptonote chains and forks, including Monero today. In DeroHE there are no view keys. DeroHE, known as Stargate, was released in Q1 2022, uses homomorphic encryption, supports smart contracts and has nothing to do with Atlantis.
Above I have listed the most frequent talking points used to discredit Dero. Riccardo Spagni, the lead curator of Monero, also has a long history of attacking Dero. There have been allegations recently that Spagni collaborated with Interpol to de-anonymize Monero users. While Spagni has denied the allegations, the rumour itself betrays a technical possibility and comes to show how the privacy model used by Monero is less trustless than Dero’s because Monero uses obfuscation versus Dero’s encryption.
Howard Chu is another early Monero contributor that frequently spreads misinformation about Dero on Twitter. He has been caught faking his CV to impersonate his brother’s career. Another frequent talking point in the disinformation campaign against Dero that circulates in the Monero community is the 2M Dero premine. Dero’s team has been fully anonymous from day 1 and also fully transparent about the premine. The scope of the premine was to provide funding to cover for development and marketing costs along the years. Dero’s ethos from the start was to be a self funded grassroot project. To this day, almost 5 years since project’s launch, Dero’s 2M premine is split in 2 halves, 1 million community and 1 million dev fund. The community fund is untouched. The dev fund has been used to fund operations to this day. Worth noting, on the other hand, that 65% of Monero’s supply (45% + 20%) was mined in the first 2 years. This means to this day a huge amount of Monero’s supply could be in the hands of few holders.
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