Ladies and gents and everyone beyond, it's your friend Dr. Sarang Noether here again! My current funding round is nearly complete, and I'm up for three more months of research for the Monero Research Lab. My humble thanks go out to those who have supported the Lab's work in the past through financial support or in spirit.

I won't insult your intelligence by rehashing all the gory details of the past few months, as you can read my reports for July and August (with September to follow) at your leisure. But I certainly can sum it up by saying that I have been very busy with a great many projects. Bulletproofs have been successfully audited, hardened for security, and made blazingly efficient compared to our initial work, and they're ready to go with our upcoming network upgrade. New research into refund transactions and payment channel foundations continues with good research under our belt. Our multisignature scheme has undergone formal analysis and exists as a preprint for the broader cryptographic community. And there's so much more; please read the linked reports for details.

The next three months show no signs of slowing down from a research perspective. Concepts like atomic swaps, payment channels, sublinear ring signatures, zero-knowledge proof technologies, balance proofs, spent output analysis, and more are all unsolved problems in need of some attention. I and my labmates work hard every day to keep Monero safely on the cutting edge of applied cryptography. I'm game if you are.

This request is for the funding period starting 1 October 2018 and ending 31 December 2018. My dollar-value equivalent is 9000 USD per month, which is my assessment of fair compensation for a self-employed Ph.D. researcher, with all the delightful tax implications therein. This is also in line with my previous several funding requests. The funding amount is set using a 14-day exponential moving average, and can be updated if needed before funding is complete; I'll make a note below if this happens.

As always, comments and questions are welcome. Feel free to also reach out on IRC at #monero-research-lab for any particular research-related concerns.

Edit: (14 September 2018) Changed from Bollinger to EMA to set price.