Monero’s Privacy-Focused Crypto Protocol Upgrade Is Now Live

The non-contentious hard fork to upgrade one of crypto’s most popular privacy protocols, Monero, was successfully completed Saturday. The fork took place at block 2,688,888 (18:47 UTC) and enhances the network with a host of new privacy-preserving features:

Read more: Privacy Protocol Monero Is Getting a Major Upgrade

• The number of signers for a ring signature has been increased from 11 to 16 for every transaction. Ring signatures are digital signatures that can be produced by any member in a group. It should be computationally infeasible to determine which key (from that group of keys) was used to create the signature. Ring signatures make it impossible to trace the origin of a Monero transaction.

• The previous Bulletproofs algorithm was upgraded to “Bulletproofs+.” Bulletproofs are zero-knowledge proofs that enable confidential transactions. Bulletproofs+ reduces transaction size and increases transaction speed. Overall performance is expected to improve by 5%-7%.

• View tags are a new way to speed up wallet syncing by 30%-40%. Wallets that support the monero (XMR) currency include Ledger and Trezor, two popular hardware wallets. Cake wallet is a hot wallet that was originally exclusive to monero but now also supports bitcoin (BTC), litecoin (LTC) and haven (XHV).

• Fee changes will minimize fee volatility and improve overall network security.

• Multisignature functionality has been improved and critical security patches were added.

The price of XMR is holding steady, currently trading at $165.80 at the time of publication.