Following a recent protocol hard fork upgrade, Monero's transaction fees fell by around 97% from 60 cents to just 2 cents, according to crypto analytics firm Coinmetrics. share A tweet confirming the drop in fees and the associated reduction in transaction size, from 18.5kb before the fork to 3kb, a change of 80%.
The upgrade, called “Monero 0.13.0 Beryllium Bullet,” implements “bulletproof” cryptography, first introduced by researchers at Stanford University, to reduce the size and cost of transactions, especially for sensitive transactions.
Why Bulletproofs?
As mentioned above, Bulletproofs are a complementary feature that extends Monero's main privacy feature, Monero's Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT), which uses a combination of ring signatures and confidential transactions. Ring signatures are cryptographic digital signatures that protect the privacy of users on the input side of a transaction by making it nearly impossible to determine who the actual signers of the transaction were.
To achieve this privacy, extra coins (decoys) are added to each Monero transaction to hide the exact coins being signed, making it extremely difficult to parse the actual coins sent from the decoys. Before the upgrade, six decoys were added to each Monero transaction, but now there are ten decoys in each transaction.
Enhancing the privacy offered by ring signatures, Confidential Transactions allow users to hide the amounts exchanged in a transaction by leveraging a cryptographic trick called Pedersen commitments.
While the RingCT format increases the privacy of transactions, it also makes the system less scalable compared to other cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin. Bulletproof reduces the size of cryptographic proofs, significantly reducing transaction sizes. Monero cannot delete old transaction data, which is currently over 20 gigabytes out of a total of 60 gigabytes and growing, but recent upgrades mean that the network requires less storage space for transactions than before.
This article originally appeared in Bitcoin Magazine.
