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