What’s Stopping DERO From Succeeding?
A look at the core people pushing DERO (and hurting it)
The mantra of DERO is “Build it, and they will come”. And while the technology in theory is superior than many other competitors, it lacks the tools, support and community to drive growth and adoption. Today, we will look at the people who will drive DERO towards success. Technology isn’t enough. People drive technologies.
DERO Developers (aka Captain)
The is probably the biggest sin where DERO developers and the most loyal of members regularly commit. In the 2.5 years of existence and development, the response towards external developers and technical experts has been to “look at the code” and “all will be known”. Anybody from the scientific, academic industry worth their salt would be astounded by the lack of framework in introducing people to new or groundbreaking technology, with a research paper describing the technology to accompany the code/example.
Reading code to understand the technological underpinnings is possible, but it is also certainly the most inefficient manner of onboarding newcomers. DERO will continue to lose traction with industry experts by continuing this non-standard practice. Remember that even Vitalik Buterin, who started as a technical writer for online crypto sites, wrote papers describing his then theoretical work. DERO developers have not done this since 2018.
Dero Foundation
I’ve said before that a lot of what DERO Foundation claims to be doing is invisible, and has been for a year since its formation. If work has been done, it has not been done with good project management practices. If it has not, that would be the worst possible scenario since any technological release will be barely accompanied with the supporting tools to launch successfully.
Nevertheless there are still some insights to the manner with which the DERO Foundation has managed itself by looking at the people behind it.
Dan Kingsbury, CEO (aka dank)
Command, the not command-line but GUI wallet
Command, is the not command-line but GUI wallet for DERO. Unfortunately, the naming is confusing and has led to many occasions where people simply do not know what CMD or Command is. Many have thought Command is the command-line wallet instead. The people behind DERO have always put marketing and communication at the backburner, but it seems that they themselves will struggle if/when they finally do try to market and communicate DERO.
Josh Byatt, COO and acting CFO (aka joshy)
Joshy has been relatively quiet compared to the other Foundation members as of late. A label such as COO and CFO, holding dual positions makes him an important figure in DERO Foundation, who will be managing a portion of the premined funds.
Instead, it seems that Joshy has been captivated by the prospects of being a livestreamer or is training to become a pilot or trucker by clocking 3–4 hour simulator sessions on a near daily basis.
twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/notoriousjoshyb/videos?filter=all
I was only made aware of the twitch site when Joshy linked to it in his twitter, but the link has since been removed. The number of hours clocked per day does not bode well the fact that DERO Foundation has regularly mentioned that they are working from behind the scenes. Remember that as the acting CFO, Joshy is of particular importance since he is the acting Chief Finance Officer.
Rito Escobedo, CTO (aka kryptoid)
Kryptoid is one of the stronger participants as the de-facto moderator in DERO’s discord and telegram. As a CTO, he has written a few technical guides and tutorials on his medium account. However, his strong-handed moderation has systematically reduced overall activity and involvement with the community to the point where the DERO community appears to have negative growth. This is the opposite of most crypto communities where communities grow even while the technology is theoretical and in development. If DERO means to wait for the technology to be developed first, it should not have created its cryptocurrency first and waited until then. (Zerochain is developing similar features and it has not created a cryptocurrency.) It certainly feels like there are less than 10 active community members in the Discord and Telegram at any given time these days. With low liquidity in exchanges, these two indicators support an overall lack of interest in DERO until it can prove itself.
The DERO Foundation Game Plan
With a CEO that doesn’t know how to name products, to a COO/CFO that’s more interested in being a virtual trucker/pilot and a CTO that promotes negative community growth, it seems that their strategy is to lean heavily on the DERO developers to produce the technology and hope that that will be enough energy to ride on. This is a highly risky proposition and is more likely to backfire than succeed in the long term.
Arguably the most telling sign is the lack of conversation or visible development of a unifying wallet for DERO tokens, how DERO smart contracts may consume external data, and how to migrate from an existing smart contract to DERO. These are basic and fundamental questions that most or all smart contract competitors have to answer to minimally be able to compete.
There just doesn’t seem to be a game plan to tackle their competitors, having a privacy component- however revolutionary is not enough.