Monero Community Hard Fork Slated for July, Increases Chain’s Ring Size

According to recent reports by Monero (XMR) developers, the network reached a community consensus to initiate a mainnet hard fork. This would take place on July 16th, at a block height 2,668,888, and would also increase the chain’s ring size from 11 to 16. The increase in the number of ring signatures ensures that transactions have a larger anonymity set. Doing so makes it more difficult to reverse engineer the sources of a transaction.

In addition, the popular privacy coin’s hard fork would introduce several new and improved features. These include the addition of view tags to outputs to reduce wallet scanning time. Furthermore, the Monero July hard fork will also be introducing bulletproofs and implementing fee changes.

More on the Upcoming Monero Hard Fork

One of the developers explained that the view tags could reduce network scanning times by 40%. The network scanning process is used to generate the output public key for its anonymous transactions. Furthermore, changes for Monero’s maximum block size to grow at 14x per year met with approval. This growth rate is currently favored over the 32x per year rate – which impacts its fee value.

Monero also intends to finally use bulletproofs, a zero-knowledge proving system, for its range proofs. As a result of this feature, faster encryption and verification of the protocol will be faster.

Some media sources previously reported the recent surge in the prices of privacy coins, including XMR, Dash (DASH), and Zcash (ZEC). These coins recently saw considerable bumps in prices despite the controversial nature of privacy coins within the crypto community. However, the reason for the recent surge in privacy coins could be practical as family funds use the token as a hedge against the recent market turbulence.

There are also others who also use privacy coins for their ability to provide increased anonymity for financial transactions. However, some still harbor misgivings over the potential usage of XMR to shroud illicit activities, hence why extremist groups allegedly favor it. This uneasiness may have contributed to Kraken opting to delist XMR for its UK customer base in November.

Zero-Knowledge Technology

Zero-knowledge scaling techs are fast becoming popular among various blockchains. For instance, back in January, Polygon (MATIC) announced the launch of Plonky2, the fastest zero-knowledge scaling technology in the world. Polygon, a Layer 2 Ethereum (ETH) scaling solution, features fast transaction times and negligible gas fees. It has already allocated $1 billion to the advancement of zero-knowledge technology.

Last week, Polygon announced its intention to attain carbon neutrality by the end of 2022. Under this commitment, the Ethereum-based software platform released a blueprint titled “Green Manifesto: A Smart Contract with Planet Earth”.

Other Monero News

Last year, Monero asked Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk to allow people purchase the company’s EVs using XMR. The community believed that adding XMR to the platform’s official list of accepted would do wonders for the asset’s adoption. Furthermore, the community earmarked three charity organizations that would receive brand new Teslas if Musk agreed to their request.

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Tolu is a cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiast based in Lagos. He likes to demystify crypto stories to the bare basics so that anyone anywhere can understand without too much background knowledge.
When he’s not neck-deep in crypto stories, Tolu enjoys music, loves to sing and is an avid movie lover.