DERO Could Be Copying Homomorphic Encryption From Another Crypto Project
Zerochain has been working transparently on homomorphic encryption since early 2019.
Zerochain was announced on 25 March 2019 that uses Substrate as the building blocks of creating it’s own blockchain. It’s goal is to create a privacy-protection on smart contracts and bears near 1:1 similarity in technological stack and features.
From their announcement:
All information tied with accounts would not be public because the additive homomorphic property allows computation on ciphertexts for updating the encrypted balances. It is a basic idea for privacy-preserving in Zerochain that all data on blockchain would be encrypted (quite simple, isn’t it?).
Some of the most famous examples of privacy-preserving blockchains would be Zcash, Monero, and Grin. These take different zero-knowledge approaches, but all of these are UTXO-based blockchain. On the other hand, Zerochain is an account-based blockchain. The point is that the elements of Key-Value mappings are encrypted.
Zerochain is a first account-based blockchain implementation for privacy-preserving.
DERO is also claiming to use additive homomorphic encryption and account-based transactions and references the same Zether Stanford academic paper that DERO uses.
However, work Zerochain on integrating Zether (homomorphic encryption + account based transaction system) started on 25 March 2019, whereas DERO only announced its work on Homomorphic Encryption in October 2019, a good 7 months behind.
Could DERO have delayed it’s release of its Cryptonote Smart Contracts platform because it saw Zerochain’s work?
Zerochain does not have a working product yet, and has not created a cryptocurrency or premine to finance their ongoing work. Instead, their development is publicly available in github with it’s latest update in December 2019. It is possible that DERO developers could have used Zerochains work in Rust language and converted them into Go language, they have done the same for Cryptonote in 2018. Zerochain could have stopped updating the public version to prevent further copying.
It’s also important to note that unlike DERO, Zerochain is not a fully homomorphic implementation and does not claim to be. Zerochain is additive homomorphic encryption, which at face-value is a similar implementation as DERO but without the dishonesty.
Why DERO continues to advertise itself as a fully homomorphic encrytion scheme is still up to DERO developers to prove.
Summarized information between the two projects:
Zerochain started work on homomorphic encryption earlier;
Zerochain has been working in public;
DERO annouced work on homomorphic encryption half a year later;
DERO has been working in secret;
DERO has a cryptocurrency to finance its development;
Zerochain does not have a cryptocurrency and is self-funded;
DERO rewrote cryptonote protocol into Golang and “evaded” copyright licenses;
DERO could have done the same for Zerochain.
To be fair, this is conjuncture and it is likely that the truth regarding the relationship between these to projects will never be known. But the history of arbitrary behaviour within the DERO project and history of adopting existing software without attribution (by rewriting them in a different language) lends credence to this theory. DERO could be facing yet another copyright and licensing issue against Zerochain, as it did with Monero previously on the Cryptonote protocol.