Monero Considering "Triptych" to Improve Privacy and Scalability

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Monero researchers have outlined a new system called “Triptych,” which could enhance Monero’s privacy and scalability.

Triptych may or may not be introduced to future versions of Monero, but it has been described in full in a Jan. 6 research paper. Researchers say they are also working on a variant with “even better scaling.”

Triptych builds on Ring Confidential Transactions, or RingCTs, which are used by Monero to obscure transaction values through decoy inputs. Triptych would allow Monero to handle a greater number of decoys more efficiently and, by extension, process highly private transactions that require very little verification time.

How It Works

Triptych offers logarithmic scaling, meaning that it would allow Monero to handle far more decoys than it currently does. Right now, Monero adds 10 decoys to each transaction by default. By contrast, Triptych would allow Monero to handle 512 decoys, and doing so would only take 45 milliseconds on average, according to developers.

Triptych has another advantage: it is trustless. In trusted setups, like that which Electric Coin Company, formerly Zcash, implemented, privacy can be compromised if initial participants collude, or if critical data is leaked.

Though Monero itself does not rely on a trusted setup, most current alternatives to Triptych do rely on such a setup, giving Triptych a possible advantage.

Will Triptych Be Used?

It’s not yet clear if Monero developers will choose to utilize Triptych. The technology is still in a preprint stage and has yet to be reviewed. There are also several other scalability improvements under consideration, including RingCT 3.0, CLSAG, Lelantus, and Omniring—all of which would enhance transaction privacy as well.

Monero has also implemented other improvements in the past. The project introduced bulletproofs in October 2018, which reduced transaction fees and transaction times significantly. Monero’s November 2019 hard fork, which is best known for introducing RandomX, also improved security and privacy through several small changes.

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