A scheduled hard fork event for Monero, the privacy-focused decentralized cryptocurrency project, took place on Saturday and added additional features to improve its privacy and security.
According to their website, multi-sig security fixes, critical security updates, and the need for extra time to address hardware wallet incompatibility concerns caused the network upgrade to be postponed from its initial scheduled release date of July 13.
What are the new changes?
One of the fork’s most significant modifications is a jump in Monero‘s ring size from 11 to 16. This is because Monero creates a new signature approving the transaction by fusing the digital signature of the person signing a transaction with that of 11 (now 16) additional non-signers to safeguard user privacy.
Additionally, the network upgrades improved the multi-sig mechanism and modified the “Bulletproofs” algorithm to speed up transactions and lower transaction sizes by around 5-7%. Along with security fixes and price adjustments, other efficiency improvements include “view tags,” which promise to slash wallet sync times by up to 40%.
View tags are a novel technique to 30%–40% increase wallet synchronization performance. Ledger and Trezor support the monero (XMR) currency, two well-known hardware wallets. Cake wallet, a popular wallet that was once only available for Monero, now accepts Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), and Haven (XHV).
Changes to fees will lessen charge volatility and boost general network security.
Critical security fixes will be applied, and multi-signature capabilities will be enhanced.
Who was involved?
In comparison, the Monero project is substantially larger. Monero has received contributions from more than 300 developers globally. Seventy-one developers worked together on the most recent upgrade, demonstrating the strength of the Monero developer community.
