The Monero network has undergone a successful update, a hard fork that promises to reduce the size of transaction data, resulting in quicker, cheaper transactions. This expands the capability of what is the best privacy coin on the market right now.
Monero developers began the process of implementing bulletproofs in December 2017, as per a blog post on the official Monero site. In the post, Monero community developer Sarang Noether identified bulletproofs as a way to maintain the security and anonymity Monero is known for, at a fraction of the size.
Noether wrote: “With our current range proofs, the transaction is around 13.2 kB in size. If I used single-output bulletproofs, the transaction reduces in size to only around 2.5 kB! This is, approximately, an 80% reduction in transaction size, which then translates to an 80% reduction in fees as well.
“Overall, bulletproofs represent a huge advancement in Monero transactions. We get massive space savings, better verification times, and lower fees.”
The Monero team announced the scheduled update via Twitter on the 4th of October. It has been live for over a day now, with no significant issues reported thus far. The team updated their Twitter yesterday with two posts. The first read, “The scheduled protocol upgraded went successfully and Monero compatible Bulletproofs are thus live on mainnet!”
That tweet was followed by one reading, “Note that the fee for a typical Monero transaction is currently approximately $0.005-$0.01!”
The Monero account retweeted several accounts from XMR users confirming a significant decrease in transaction fees since the update.
Additionally, initial data from Monero miners has indicated a drop in mining difficulty. Another focus of the update was to maintain open access to Monero mining, fighting against the domination of crypto mining by high-powered ASIC miners. The update takes on this challenge by reducing the ledger size (through smaller transactions), as well as an alteration to the mining code, and appear to be successful thus far.
Though Monero’s update is technically a hard fork, there will not be any change to the token, as with the Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash fork. XMR tokens will continue to be used and continue to be valid for Monero transactions.
So far there has been little impact on the markets. XMR’s price has hovered around $102-$105 for the last week, with the exception of the market-wide blip on the 15th, at which time it went as low as $99 and as high as $111.
It remains to be seen if the fork will have any long-term effect on Monero’s value. What is clear is that this update is a positive signs for transactional users of XMR. You can read our full XMR price prediction article here.
Andrew is a writer and digital marketer from New Zealand, now based out of South East Asia. Along with his work in many areas of the e-commerce space, Andrew has a keen interest in cryptocurrency, especially altcoins and projects focused on mainstream crypto adoption
