The Monero Research Lab (MRL) has released Triptych in a Jan. 6 paper proposing trustless logarithmic-size ring signatures. As Monero’s core anonymity mechanism, research aimed at decreasing their size could improve the coin’s privacy significantly.
Monero (XMR) is a privacy coin that uses several distinct mechanisms to obfuscate parts of a transaction. The primary line of defense against transaction tracing comes from ring signatures. These work by aggregating a sender’s true coins with a set of decoys, picked semi-randomly from other points in the blockchain. There are currently 24 decoys added by default to any transaction, though a user can choose to include fewer or more of them — which directly impacts the transaction’s cost.