Monero hard fork to improve security and privacy

Amid debates over privacy and decentralization in the crypto market, Monero (XMR) reported that it has performed a hard fork to become a more secure and even more private protocol.

On August 13, one of the most important privacy protocols on the market performed an update focused on improving several of its features.

As reported by the protocol, the hard fork was successful at block 2,688,888. More than 70 developers helped with the update, which was announced about four months ago. Initially, the update was supposed to take place in July, but the developers pushed it back to August.

“Congratulations on a successful network update! Monero is now more private and efficient with ringssize 16, Bulletproofs+ and preview tags! Make sure your node/wallet is up to date to continue using Monero. Privacy and fungibility are important. And it’s exciting to keep improving!” the protocol tweeted.

Monero hard fork

According to the team, the update made several fixes to the internal multi-signature (multisig) mechanism. The objective was to facilitate the exchange of information, such as key sets and data synchronization between wallets.

“Multisig means that a transaction needs multiple signatures before it can be sent to the Monero network and executed. Instead of a Monero wallet creating, signing and sending transactions on its own, you will have a whole group of wallets and collaboration between them to carry out the transactions,” says the Monero website.

Also, another update that took place in the fork had to do with the number of signers of signatures increasing from 11 to 16. These signatures ensure that it is impossible to trace the origin of transactions on the network.

As the team highlighted in the tweet, the bulletproof zero-knowledge algorithm has received an update to bulletproof+.

In practice, this means that the transaction size has been reduced by about 5-7%. In this way, the performance of the scan will be improved by 5% to 7%, making transactions lighter and faster.

Another improvement was the “View Tags”. The option that allows you to speed up wallet synchronization by 30% to 40%. This helps to increase the overall performance of Monero (XMR).

About Monero (XMR)

Monero, whose native token is XMR, is an open source protocol released in 2014. According to the project’s website, the XMR token is secure, private and untraceable that keeps transactions confidential.

At the time of writing, the token is priced at around 165 USD.