Content
@
0 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
Varun Thakore
@varunthakore
Excited to share that my master’s thesis work — "MProve-Nova: A Privacy-Preserving Proof of Reserves Protocol for Monero" — has been accepted at PETS 2025. This is joint work with my thesis advisor, Prof. Saravanan Vijayakumaran (@sarva.eth).
1 reply
1 recast
1 reaction
Varun Thakore
@varunthakore
A Proof of Reserves (PoR) protocol allows an exchange to prove ownership of a certain amount of cryptocurrency on the blockchain. It is sometimes also referred to as Proof of Assets.
1 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
Varun Thakore
@varunthakore
"MProve-Nova" is the first privacy-preserving PoR protocol for Monero that reveals no information about the exchange — except the number of owned UTXOs. It is also the first Monero PoR with proof size and verification time independent of the number of UTXOs owned by the exchange.
1 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
Varun Thakore
@varunthakore
It achieves this using folding schemes as described in the Nova paper. For each step computation of Nova, the exchange: - proves ownership of a UTXO - proves the UTXO is present on the Monero blockchain - proves the UTXO has not been spent (its key image is not in the key image set) - proves the same UTXO has not been used in previous steps (no double-counting) - adds a Pedersen commitment corresponding to the UTXO amount to a running commitment to total reserves
1 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
Varun Thakore
@varunthakore
We also present a non-collusion protocol to detect cases where two exchanges try to generate PoR proofs using the same UTXOs. We implemented "MProve-Nova" using bellpepper (a library to write R1CS circuits) and the Nova implementation by Microsoft.
1 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
Varun Thakore
@varunthakore
Code: https://github.com/varunthakore/mprove-nova Paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/665
1 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
Varun Thakore
@varunthakore
Huge thanks to Prof. Saravanan Vijayakumaran (@sarva.eth) for his guidance and mentorship. He’s a fantastic advisor and amazing to work with. He currently has some openings, and I highly recommend applying if you’re interested: https://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/~sarva/openings/
0 reply
0 recast
1 reaction
