Monero is one of the best privacy cryptocurrencies available in the market but due to its high cpu usage needed for processing the transactions and the bloated blockchain, it hasn’t been able to grow as much as it would have wanted. This is why it is now planning to implement BulletProofs, a new way of implementing privacy, which will both improve its speed and decrease its transaction size.

What is Monero?

Monero is a secure untraceable cryptocurrency. Like bitcoin, it uses proof of work but using a different algorithm known as cryptonote. Monero uses ring signatures, confidential transactions and stealth addresses to hide the origin, amount and destinations of all transactions. Transactions on the monero blockchain cannot be linked to one another which makes it fungible and prevents vendors or companies from blacklisting particular coins.

What are BulletProofs?

Adam back first proposed confidential transactions in 2013 as a way of bringing private transactions to the bitcoin network but the transactions were consuming 16 times the space of the normal transactions. Due to the bulky size of the transactions, the proposal was dismissed.

A new paper was proposed recently by Benedikt Bunz, Jonathan Bootle and Andrew Poelstra which reduced the size of the transactions to 3 times instead of 16 times which makes the proposal much more attractive now. Still bitcoin has a lot of scaling issues that needs to addressed first and it is still far away from being implemented on bitcoin.

This is where Monero is taking advantage of this opportunity and has already implemented bulletproofs on its testnet.

Benefits of BulletProofs for Monero

Monero currently uses rangeproofs to ensure that all commitments made in the transactions is within a specific range without revealing the particular amount involved. But rangeproofs scale linearly in size and make the bulk of the transactions. Also if there are multiple outputs in the transaction, they need separate range proofs which increases the size further more.Using bulletproofs, the size of the transactions only increases logarithmically with increase in the size of the range and the number of outputs.

Currently if someone sends a transactions with single input and two outputs, the size of the transactions is around 13.2kb. Using bulletproofs, this size is reduced to just 2.5kb which is around 80% improvement. The size improvement is further more in multiple output transactions. Also, the testing found out that validating bulletproof transactions is much more speedier than rangeproof transactions.

BulletProof Release Timeline

According the Fluffypony’s recent talk with Jimmy song, the code for bulletproofs has already been merged into the master branch and anyone can compile and run it on testnet. They are planning on releasing the testnet in a week and if everything goes right, we will have bulletproofs in the upcoming monero hard fork in march next year.

Conclusion

Bulletproofs is an amazing development for both monero and bitcoin community and it will help both the chains in the long run. Let us know how you feel about this amazing upgrade for the monero community.