Monero (XMR), the well-known privacy coinunderwent a major upgrade yesterday under the name ‘Fluorine Fermi’, which was officially launched in April has been revealed. The upgrade has version number 0.18 and offers some major improvements to the cryptocurrency network.
Major upgrade for Monero now live
In a blog post, the developers wrote that network participants should update their nodes, because the network upgrade is basically a hard fork is. The new version has a lot of improvements regarding speed and privacy of the crypto.
Congratulations on a successful network upgrade! #monero is now more private and efficient with ringssize 16, Bulletproofs+, and view tags!
Make sure your node/wallet is updated to continue using Monero.
Privacy and fungibility matter, and it’s exciting to keep improving!
— Monero (XMR) (@monero) August 13, 2022
Monero uses so-called ‘rings’. Blockchains use digital signatures or hashes to confirm transactions. The rings are groups of these signatures that make it extra unclear who a transaction comes from. This number has now been increased from eleven to sixteen.
The Bulletproofs+ algorithm has also been implemented. This reduces the storage space you need for a transaction, which increases the speed of the network. As a result, performance should increase by 5% to 7%.
The graphical user interface (GUI) has also been improved. There are new app versions of Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets. The time between opening your wallet software and refreshing your balance is now faster, even 30% to 40% faster.
You can also skip the ‘home page’ of the app now, and the multi-signature functionality has also been improved. Furthermore, minor bug fixes and important security patches have been added.
Governments not a fan of Monero
Monero is one of the most controversial cryptocurrencies on the market. It tries to protect your privacy, while most blockchains are almost completely transparent. Governments really like the transparency because it makes fighting crime a lot easier. Monero is widely used by criminals precisely because of its better privacy.
But governments go very far in their war against privacy. This became apparent last Friday, for example, when the Dutch Fiscal Intelligence and Investigation Service (FIOD) arrested a Tornado Cash co-founder, much to the horror of the crypto community.
Last April, the Reddit forum for crypto found that crypto exchanges don’t always have the amount of XMR tokens they say. The privacy functions prevent trading platforms from having to be honest about this. The forum members wanted to organize a kind of short squeeze à la WallStreetBets.