3-Months full-time software development on monero components in 2026 q3

What

Work primarily on monerod, wallet2, monero-lws, lwsf, and fhse. Some of the work to be attempted or investigated:

• Code reviews of monero core PRs
• monerod/monero-lws/lwsf bug fixes and HackerOne mitigations as they arrive
• Investigate removing "practical" limit on block sizes
  • This will primarily be continuing the GH issue, and continuing the serialization PRs
    • Modifying existing serialization code to remove the "hard" 16,383 tx limit is possible, but the "soft" 8,190 tx limit on pruned blocks is harder to remove
  • Other projects appear to just use working memory; if the block exceeds working memory of the machine, it just hard fails
• Add cbor support to ZMQ REP/REQ sockets
• Keep existing PRs up-to-date:
  • New Serialization routine
  • Change from raw pointers to weak_ptrs in levin code
  • P2P SSL Support
  • Updating levin callbacks to C++14 moves
  • Add cbor support to monerod-ZMQ PUB/SUB
• Find (possible) memory leak in weak_ptr PR
• Complete work necessary to merge DANE/TLSA in wallet2/epee.
• Adding trust-on-first-use support to wallet2
• monero-lws work:
  • Add a “quick-sync” more where the client can sync from a specific height that is not the wallet creation height
    • This is trickier than it first appears due to reorgs
  • Finish 1.0 release/tag
    • Branch and signing keys are done, just awaiting more testing
    • GPG signing key is ready, just needs distribution
  • Update LWS spec and implementation to support new "carrot" features (view-balance key, etc).
    • LWS draft PR supports view-balance keys, but a spec needs to be written and posted.
  • Keep LWS backend synced with fcmp++ experimental branch
    • May need to change the draft spec for fcmp++ curve trees
  • Add a "scale" factor to remote scanning load balancing - send more accounts to systems with faster single thread performance
  • Add 64-bit ed25519 code for faster arm64 scanning. Latest "Supercop" has unverified neon implementation.
    • This may get shelved as fcmp++ looms.
  • (Unlikely) - reproducible builds so community members can verify+sign the binary hashes
• lwsf (LWSF-frontend) work:
  • Add "push" updates to Skylight wallet:
    • Add on_refresh callbacks to monero_c fork
    • Add on_refresh dart hooks to monero_c
    • Update Skylight to let lwsf/wallet2 handle refreshing
    • Hopefully upstream maintainers accept! - a LWS server configured with ZMQ PUB/SUB gets nearly immediate update in wallet UI
  • Add a “quick-sync” more where the client can sync from a specific height that is not the creation height
  • Implement fee estimation (may skip until fcmp++, much easier)
  • Add carrot/fcmp++ view-balance-key support (receive and spend). View-incoming will not be used by lwsf.
    • legacy keys and fcmp++ are verified as working
    • update fcmp++ draft pr to match latest changes
    • waiting on monero core to decide how to handle carrot wallets - polyseed? some other thing?
  • Complete remainder of functions, EXCEPT for multisig and a few other non-critical functions.
    • The remainder of work is primarily support for hardware devices
  • Better support for handling (dropping) "dust" outputs during "sweeps"
  • Identify + fix bug with double spend and pending transactions
• FHSE library
  • Investigate NFC FIDO2 hmac-secret support on iOS and Android
  • Create dart/flutter bindings in the hope that Cake and/or Skylight will incorporate the lib
  • Investigate incorporating into lwcli for testing feasibility. This is easier than incorporating into flutter, which requires dart bindings, and separate FIDO2 for mobile
  • Perhaps Skylight will accept this library? Will look into getting it working on non-mobile platforms at the least.
  • Adoption is likely stalled until carrot/jamtis as recovery process is easier
    • Plenty of time to get the NFC stuff working!

There is intentionally more work than time allows - to ensure there is always something to work on in the proposal.

Who

Lee Clagett (vtnerd). I've had nine CCS, proposals (6 7, 8, and 9), and one Magic Grant.

Some of my biggest features in monero core repo are Dandelion++, adding supercop ASM speedups to wallet code, ZeroMQ Pub Support for new blocks and transactions, and SSL support to p2p.

I've created lwsf - a client library for the LWS protocol that implements the monero-gui C++ interface. This library powers the new skylight wallet, and is now in real-world use. This library also supports a websocket /feed from the server such that real-time updates to a wallet are now possible (as opposed to polling/delayed notificaiton in all others).

I’ve also created a lib for encrypted files with FIDO2 keys. The objective is for wallets to opt-in to FIDO2 wallet encryption (instead of password only protection). This may have to wait for carrot/fcmp++, as recovery can be made easier.

I've also made a functional LWS wallet scanner - which the lwsf/skylight communicates with - which is fully non-blocking to support more responses per thread, admin REST API, LMDB storage, subaddress support, webhook/zmq/rmq publishing (new receives, spends, and accounts), multi-machine scanning with (primitive) load-balancing, and an untrusted daemon mode that verifies PoW is valid (whereas normal wallets trust monerod responses entirely).

Proposal

Work on the various tasks outlined above for 40 hours/week over the next 3 months after potential funding. I already use time-tracking software for work; if the hours dip in a given month unexpectedly, the update/milestone will be at the completion of the hours listed above.

The funds were calculated with 65 USD/hour with ~321.45 USD/XMR which is the 14-day exponential moving average on Kraken through 2026/07/09.