A non-contentious hard fork to upgrade Monero, one of cryptocurrency’s most popular privacy protocols, was successfully completed on Saturday. The fork took place at block 2,688,888 (18:47 UTC) and strengthened the network with a number of new privacy-protecting features.
read more: Privacy Protocol Monero Gets Major Upgrade
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The number of signers for ring signatures has increased from 11 to 16 per transaction. A ring signature is a digital signature that can be created by any member in a group. It is computationally infeasible to determine which key (from that group of keys) was used to create the signature. Ring signatures make it impossible to trace the origin of a Monero transaction.
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The previous Bulletproofs algorithm has been upgraded to “Bulletproofs+”. Bulletproofs are zero-knowledge proofs that enable confidential transactions. Bulletproofs+ reduces transaction size and improves transaction speed. Overall performance is expected to improve by 5%-7%.
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ViewTag is a new way to sync wallets 30%-40% faster. Two popular hardware wallets that support the Monero (XMR) currency are Ledger and Trezor. Cake wallet is a hot wallet that was originally only for Monero, but now also supports Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), and Haven (XHV).
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The fee changes will minimize fee fluctuations and improve security across the network.
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Improved multi-signing functionality and added important security patches.
The price of XMR has remained stable and is currently trading at $165.80 at the time of writing.
