Dero was developed from scratch to support millions of users with enhanced reliability, privacy, security and usability. It followed a “build it and they will come” approach in the sense that the team focused on designing working technology first, before focusing on marketing.

One of its key features is the utilization of CryptoNote, a protocol that conceals the sender and receiver of a transaction, protecting the identity of all parties involved and ensuring privacy. It is also the first blockchain to have complete SSL in the peer-to-peer layer. This encrypts all its network traffic and conceals it from internet service providers wishing to analyze the traffic.

Dero is also the first CryptoNote blockchain to have 75 transactions per second on its native blockchain, not using any scaling solutions like lightning networks. Notably, this is significantly above the roughly five transactions per second Bitcoin achieves. Furthermore, it has ten times faster Bulletproof than normal. Bulletproofs is a cryptographic technique that reduces the space needed for zero-knowledge range proofs.

As such, Dero might address use cases that require privacy such as voting services, escrow services, and address certification/verification. Given the team's progress made so far, it established a minimum viable product in August 2018 and plans to launch smart contracts on the mainnet in Q3 2021; Dero can lay a legitimate claim on being one of the top privacy coins on the market.

Dero designed its unique and powerful security mechanism. Besides the outlined features, Dero implemented a new mining algorithm called AstroBWT, an open-source proof-of-work consensus mechanism based on one-CPU-one-vote. This consensus mechanism reduces the performance advantage of specialized hardware, preventing the sort of miner oligopoly that Bitcoin suffers from, with miners using ASICs to mine Bitcoin. This distributes mining rewards more fairly and a consensus is reached by a majority decision via CPU power of its network of nodes.

By combining the CryptoNote protocol with DAG, Dero is resistant to hash rate attacks and soft forks without suffering downtime. It is also the fastest CryptoNote-based blockchain deployed.

Check out Iota — another project built on directed acyclic graph technology.

Check out Monero (XMR) — the most popular privacy coin.

Check out Z-Cash (ZEC) — another privacy coin.

Learn more about privacy coins in our detailed guide to privacy coins.

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