Contributing to DERO

The DERO core lives in two GitHub repositories, and the split trips people up. Some applications also build against their own thin forks layered on top — those are covered at the end of this page. This page is the plain map: where core development happens, where to contribute, and where the binaries you run come from.

Short version: Active development lives at DEROFDN/derohe (opens in a new tab) on the community-dev branch — that's where to read the current code and open pull requests. The binaries most people run today are still the deroproject/derohe releases (opens in a new tab), because DEROFDN has not cut its own release yet.

The two repositories

	Where to look	Status
DEROFDN/derohe (opens in a new tab)	The active, community-maintained home. Fixes and improvements land here first.	Where development and contribution happen.
deroproject/derohe (opens in a new tab)	The original upstream repository. Its `main` branch has been unchanged since early 2026.	Still hosts the released binaries (`Release142` at time of writing). `main` is not open to community merges.

The community is consolidating on DEROFDN/derohe. That is the repository this documentation, the ecosystem tooling, and the developers point to. deroproject/derohe remains the historical source and — for now — the home of the tagged releases; its community-mainnet branch, and the Release142 binaries built from it, are kept in sync from DEROFDN's community-mainnet, so today's releases already track the DEROFDN line.

Why two repositories?

Administration of deroproject/derohe — including who can be granted maintainer access — rests with its original owner. To let the active community govern its own maintainers and merge process rather than depend on access it cannot grant itself, development moved to DEROFDN/derohe. The two are kept in sync, so this is a move of the working home, not a fork of the chain: DEROFDN/derohe builds the same consensus-compatible DERO.

Branch model

Both repositories carry the same community branch layout. On DEROFDN/derohe, the one that matters day to day is community-dev.

Branch	Purpose
`community-dev`	Active development and testing. New fixes and improvements land here first. Contribute here.
`community-mainnet`	The mainnet-consensus line — changes that fit the existing protocol, headed toward a release.
`community-testnet`	A sandbox for larger, hardfork-scale experiments.
`main`	The base line. It currently trails `community-dev`, which carries the newer fixes.

⚠️

Because community-dev carries fixes that have not yet reached main or a tagged release, reading main alone can be misleading. When you want to see the current state of a fix, look at community-dev.

How to contribute

1. Fork DEROFDN/derohe 2. Branch from community-dev 3. Open a pull request against community-dev

Base your branch on community-dev, not main — main is behind.
Keep changes targeted. The maintainers favour small, clean, reviewable fixes over sweeping rewrites.
Open the pull request against community-dev so it lands where the current work is.
For documentation changes (this site), see the dero-docs contributing guide (opens in a new tab) instead — the docs live in a separate repository.

Which binaries should I run?

The latest released binaries are published at:

https://github.com/deroproject/derohe/releases

At the time of writing that is Release142. Release publishing is expected to move to DEROFDN/derohe so that the binaries people run come from the same repository as active development; until that first DEROFDN release is cut, the deroproject releases above remain the ones to use.

Watch DEROFDN/derohe releases (opens in a new tab) — once a release lands there, that becomes the recommended download and this page will point to it.

Downstream forks

Some applications build against a curated thin fork rather than DEROFDN/derohe directly. For example, HOLOGRAM (opens in a new tab) builds against DHEBP/derohe (opens in a new tab).

These forks carry walletapi / UX / privacy patches only and are consensus-identical with DEROFDN — the same network, the same derod behaviour, no chain split. Their changes are open as pull requests to DEROFDN/derohe, so the fork delta shrinks as upstream merges them.

A downstream fork is a packaging choice for one application — not a separate chain, and not a separate place to contribute. If you want those patches in DERO, they are already headed to community-dev. To contribute to DERO itself, use DEROFDN/derohe as described above.

Documentation

This site, derod.org (opens in a new tab), is the community-maintained documentation for DERO, published by DHEBP. It is not a Foundation channel — it is community docs the ecosystem has chosen to point at. Corrections and additions are welcome through the dero-docs repository (opens in a new tab).