In April of 2022, Serai began development on monero-serai. Originally attempting to build a library to facilitate multisignature signing of Monero transactions, using the Monero C++ codebase and the existing monero-rs project, monero-serai soon became a completely independent implementation of the Monero transaction protocol. It had the goal of being usable throughout the entire Monero community, not just the Serai protocol, offering a modern representation of transactions, signing, and even an efficient multisignature protocol.
In February of 2023, the Cuprate project began, striving to build a complete implementation of the Monero protocol in Rust. Later that same year, they adopted monero-serai to represent transactions and validate Monero's zero-knowledge proofs, contributing back implementations of legacy aspects of the Monero protocol and helping to ensure the library's quality.
Due to monero-serai intending to benefit the community, a request was made for the Monero community to crowdfund an audit. Raising the funds, Cypher Stack was contracted to prove the security of our multisignature protocol audit monero-serai. This produced FROSTLASS, a formalized and proven-secure threshold signing protocol for CLSAGs inspired by FROST, and the audit of monero-serai itself. FROSTLASS offers a major performance improvement over the multisignature implementation inherently present in Monero, and now formally proven, can be strongly recommended for implementation by anyone who wants to secure Monero within a threshold multisig.
Audit in-hand, to ensure monero-serai would remain a neutral library, monero-serai was transferred to the recently-formed monero-oxide organization. The organization is led by boog900, maintainer of Cuprate, and kayabaNerve, lead developer of Serai. Together, they're trusted to steward it for the benefit of the whole Monero community. Our upcoming goal will be a 1.0 release, representing a degree of stability over our APIs.
In the future, monero-oxide will also take responsibility for the Rust libraries underpinning Monero's Full-Chain Membership Proofs++ upgrade, prior maintained personally by kayabaNerve. The generalized-bulletproofs library, implementing the zero-knowledge proof underlying FCMPs, is expected to be merged into the monero-oxide repository in the near future.
By the generosity of Power Up Privacy, we are also able to announce a $100,000 bug bounty for monero-oxide. Payouts will be in XMR and entirely handled by Power Up Privacy. We offer this to prioritize our implementation's security and accuracy, welcoming security researchers to take a look. Our codebase includes Rust code, zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party protocols, and soon even elliptic curve implementations, offering a plethora of topics to review.
If you wish to keep an eye on, or discuss, monero-oxide, please join Cuprate's Matrix, which currently hosts discussions for the monero-oxide organization. We look forward to seeing you there!