Monero's July hard fork confirmed by its community

The upcoming hard fork is expected to solve major challenges in the existing network

By Shashank Bhardwaj

Image: Shutterstock

In a recent GitHub post, Monero (XMR) developers have confirmed that the network will undergo a hard fork on July 16, 2022. The Monero network has apparently reached a community consensus to commence a mainnet hard fork at a block height of 2,668,888. In May, a testnet will be deployed.

Launched in 2014, Monero (XMR) is a privacy-focused open-source cryptocurrency. Monero's blockchain has been designed to be as opaque as possible. By concealing the addresses used by participants, transaction details such as the identity of senders and recipients, as well as the amount of each transaction, are made entirely anonymous. This is in contrast to Bitcoin, where wallet addresses and transactional activity can be used to determine a user's identity.

At the time of writing, Monero is trading at $254.01 and has a market capitalization of $4.5 billion. XMR is also currently the 32nd largest crypto by market cap. Coindesk reports that XMR prices have climbed by around 11 percent in the last 24 hours as a result of the hard fork announcement. “Prices spiked to as much as $277 on Monday night, breaking over a major resistance level at $240.”

A hard fork occurs when nodes of the most recent blockchain version no longer accept the earlier version(s), resulting in a permanent separation from the previous version of the blockchain. The upcoming hard fork will be Monero's fifteenth software version (V15). The previous two versions, which went live in October 2020, only had minor improvements.

The chain's ring size is slated to expand from 11 to 16 in Monero's upcoming hard fork. These added ring signatures are anticipated to enhance transaction privacy and make it difficult to reverse-engineer transaction sources.

Developers also intend to add view tags to outputs to cut the time it takes to check a wallet's balance and transactions by up to 40 percent. Monero's block size was also approved to grow 14 times per year rather than 32 times per year, resulting in lower transaction costs. Finally, Monero will use Bulletproofs, a zero-knowledge proving mechanism, for range proofs. This will ensure that the information recorded in a confidential transaction is completely accurate.

Shashank is the founder at yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist. Twitter: @bhardwajshash

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