Monero (XMR) developers have announced that the network has passed a community consensus to implement a mainnet hard fork. The hard fork will come with multiple changes for the Monero network.
Monero passes consensus for mainnet hard fork
The developers said the mainnet hard fork would be implemented on a block height of 2,668,888. The hard fork will bring several changes to the Monero ecosystem. One of these changes will be to increase the ring size from 11 to 16.
Increasing the number of ring signatures will increase the anonymity set of transactions. This will make it nearly impossible to reverse engineer the source of a transaction, boosting the network’s security.
The hard fork will also add view tags to outputs, reducing the time spent scanning wallets. According to one developer, the view tags can reduce the time spent in scanning by up to 40%. This will speed up obtaining the output public key needed to anonymize transactions.
Monero’s mainnet hard fork will also introduce changes to the fee system. The changes approved by the community will see the maximum block size increase by 14x every year instead of 32x, which will consequently affect the network’s fee value.
Lastly, the fork will also introduce bulletproofs. Bulletproofs is a zero-knowledge proving system implemented in range proofs on the Monero network. The feature will lead to faster encryption time and promote verification on the blockchain.
The popularity of privacy coins
Privacy coins have become increasingly popular over the past year. These coins have become preferable investments by individuals and family funds. Holding cryptocurrencies such as XMR has also become an ideal strategy to hedge against market recessions.
Despite their popularity, privacy coins are also highly controversial. Privacy coins offer a high level of anonymity during transaction processing. However, the issue of anonymity has also raised concern over the use of these assets for illicit activities such as money laundering and terrorism financing.
Some exchanges have also delisted XMR due to regulatory scrutiny. In 2021, the Kraken exchange delisted XMR for its UK customers following pressure from regulators.
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