Decentralized cryptocurrency Monero (XMR) undergoes a hard fork with its latest update to enhance the network’s transaction speed and resilience to hacking attacks. Announced in April, the long-awaited update saw collaboration between 71 developers, with the hard fork taking place at block 2,688,888.
Aiming to provide a private and secure cryptocurrency for regions with depressed economies, the Monero team released the CLI and GUI version 0.18.1.0 (Fluorine Fermi) in July to prepare for the hard fork. However, the price of the XMR token hasn’t seen any notable changes since the update.
Besides reducing wallet sync times by 30%, the update increased the ring size from 11 to 16, thereby ensuring the transactions on the network have a more extensive anonymity set. In addition, this update enhanced the transaction speed and size by transitioning to the Bulletproofs+ algorithm. The update also added significant security patches and multisig fixes to the Monero ecosystem. Lastly, the hard fork update brought changes to the protocol’s fee infrastructure.
Twitter user afungible states that the protocol triggered dynamic memory allocation for the first time after hitting a block size of 310kB and claims, ”This shows, #Monero scales well. Great stress test for the network.” They also compared the network’s fees and claimed that the lowest transaction fee had increased roughly five times since the hard fork update went live.
