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Monero Expressed: 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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
