Episode 7 of the Outlaw Crypto Podcast is my interview with secretnamebasis, a DERO community member and developer who was kind enough to come on the show and talk to us about the DERO Project. DERO is a privacy coin with Fully Homomorphic Encryption, smart contracts and private assets which is pioneering a more private Web3.
Definitions are important, but where do they come from? In a previous article I explained the cardinal definition of full homomorphic encryption and how it applies to Dero.
Private smart contracts are one of those poorly defined things that some are rushing to turn into a buzzword before most people learn what the term actually means. As with everything else, the best way to understand something vague is to look at practical examples. In the case of smart contracts, the 2 extremes on the opposite sides of the privacy spectrum are Ethereum and Dero.
The constant drone of online presence has led to near limitless exposure of our personal data. The rise of social media, digital identity, online transactions, and the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices all scatters our personal data like a relentless flood, across myriads of platforms and thus custodians. On one hand, this trend allows the world to enjoy unprecedented connectivity and convenience. On the other, it leaves us all vulnerable to an incomprehensibly wide spectrum of privacy intrusions, data exploits and social engineering.
My writing effort led to all kinds of tangents and thoughts and became a little sidetracked, never really getting to a point or staying on topic. I’m a bit of a scatterbrain sometimes.
So bear with me. It may also be a difficult read that expects a fair amount of existing blockchain and DERO understanding.
What exactly is homomorphic encryption anyway and why is it a big deal?
In this article I intend to discuss just a few of the points on privacy in modern society and in particular how it’s relation to the current state of the global financial system. I will be addressing both transparent and private blockchains as well as the looming new push toward Central Bank Digital Currencies.
Homomorphic Encryption is the process of performing operations on encrypted data without decrypting it first. It has often been referred to as the holy grail in cryptography and distrubted computing. It has also been researched by the largest companies in the world such as IBM.
DERO is a general purpose platform for building unstoppable decentralised applications and securely storing and transferring value. It is an original protocol which has been built from scratch and is maintained by the developer team who created it. This is not a fork or translation of any other layer 1 (L1) blockchain protocol.
Trusted Execution Environment is a method like Homomorphic Encryption, to perform operations on data in a form of encrypted state, this form is quite different though. TEE’s work by taking in encrypted data and decrypting it into an encrypted trusted area (called an enclave with Intel SGX) where operations can be performed on the data behind encryption for privacy. The trust in this setup comes from having the data in a decrypted state and having to rely on the surrounding “enclave” to be secure. If you did not create this area, if it is proprietary, then you are trusting it is secure.