Thread by @monero

1/ Seraphis, a zero-knowledge proving system from UkoeHB and the Monero Research Lab for confidential transactions that is faster, lighter, and more private, is making excellent progress!

A thread on some of the key advantages to Seraphis:

2/ It's important to note before we go further that Seraphis is a protocol abstraction, and not a specific implementation, and so there are a lot of design decisions yet to be made in the instantiation of Seraphis used in the Monero privacy protocol in the future.

3/ The first key advantage that Seraphis brings is vastly improved scaling of transaction size and verification time as decoys increase versus the currently used CLSAG. This allows a move to larger ring sizes without severe impacts to initial blockchain download or wallet sync.

4/ You can see more detailed initial performance numbers below, but keep in mind these are initial numbers and may change (likely improve) as we get closer to a specific implementation:

github.com/monero-project…

5/ This will allow for a likely 64+ ring size (instead of the current 11), allowing for greater per-transaction privacy and reducing statistical or targeted attacks effectiveness. This is enabled by Seraphis being ~4x more efficient in verification and logarithmic size scaling.

6/ The second major advantage that Seraphis brings is the possibility to use a new and improved key structure, allowing for drastically more useful view-only wallets, and much simplified offline transaction creation/signing:

github.com/monero-project…

7/ This improved view-only wallet capability makes it much easier to provide view-only capabilities to 3rd-parties, such as for a public donation address, without requiring key image export/import or other time consuming and complex tasks.

8/ The key structure improvements also lead to greatly improved offline transaction creation/signing and greatly simplified multi-sig usage in Monero, two areas that have been much more difficult in Monero up to this point. This will be a key step forward in UX for these uses.

9/ The last advantage of the key structure change would be the unification of address types -- no more "standard" and "sub" addresses, just one common type!

This simplifies the experience for users without harming privacy, and improves UX across the board.

10/ These are incredibly exciting times for Monero, and we're thankful to see such a large influx of interest in improving the Monero protocol by members of the community, researchers, and developers!

Privacy is an arms race, and Monero is doing a great job staying ahead.

11/11 For a much more detailed look at Seraphis, including the cryptography and math behind it, check out the WIP paper below:

github.com/UkoeHB/Seraphis