The Multidisciplinary Academic Grants in Cryptocurrencies (MAGIC), a 501(c) (3) nonprofit, is helping raise $5,125 to funds the development and implementation of Bulletproofs+ in Monero. The initiative is spearheaded by Dr. Sarang Noether of the Monero Research Lab (MRL). Its code will be compatible with future research like Triptych and Arcturus, details from the Go Fund Me page on Nov 18.
The Crowdfund for Public Good
Already, 11 donors have raised over $2,500. According to MAGIC, the research proposal will cover the cost of code development, the performance and testing, and the release of code in compliance with the open-source MIT license. Notably, the crowdfunded amount will not cover the cost of code auditing.
Contributing will be for the public good, MAGIC says. Every donation above $300 will be tax-deductible. Still, every donation counts and will help in their overall mission. Their overarching goal is to support the research and expansion of trustless payment infrastructure offered by cryptocurrencies.
Dr. Sarang Noether has worked on several of Monero’s projects. Some of them include the technical contribution in Arcturus for efficient proofs of confidential transactions, revised in September 2020, Dual linkable ring signatures paper that he co-authored with Brandon Goodell, among others.
Confirming on Reddit, Sarang said:
“I’m interested in working on this implementation as a one-off project, and trying it out through the MAGIC nonprofit seemed like an intriguing way to allow interested donors to contribute with more flexibility (and possibly tax benefits, since MAGIC is a registered nonprofit). I am still taking a break from full-time research, but this project felt too fun and exciting to pass up. I plan to work part-time on it, to maintain a healthy balance.”
What is Bulletproofs?
Bulletproof+, if successfully implemented, will enhance Monero’s performance by reducing transaction sizes by around five percent without impacting verification time.
Bulletproofs is a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof first proposed in Dec 2017 and is an improvement of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). Trustless systems using Bulletproofs are faster and more efficient helping save space. In networks that have incorporated this protocol, there are considerable savings related to costs, fees, and verification times.
In using Bulletproofs, there are no trusted setups required. Additionally, since the prover can aggregate proofs for a transaction with various outputs from a single input, there are block size savings as aforementioned.
Monero is also researching an atomic swap solution between its native currency, XMR, and Bitcoin (BTC) according to a BTCManager report.
