The upcoming hard fork will lead to the launch of Monero’s version fifteen, equipped with various upgrades and further optimised security
Developers of the privacy protocol Monero (XMR) announced recently via a GitHub post that the network will undergo a tentative hard fork this July. The development is expected to lead to better network security as well as fee changes. A Testnet deployment will possibly happen in May, followed by a tentative hard fork in July.
There’s no news of a separate coin launch post the mainnet hard fork, which will occur at block 2,668,888. Hard forks lead to a new version of the blockchain, rendering the old one invalid.
About Monero
Monero, the 33rd ranked cryptocurrency in the world (by market cap), at the time of writing, is a privacy-focused protocol that efficiently masks the users’ wallet addresses, making it extremely difficult for any one to track the transactions occurring with them. This is different from Bitcoin (BTC) as well as other well-known cryptocurrencies wherein it’s possible to analyse the transactional behaviour of any wallet, as well as potentially identify the user behind it.
What changes post the V15 upgrade?
The hard fork scheduled for July this year will be the fifteenth time (V15) that Monero will undergo an upgrade. Its previous two versions that introduced minor updates, went live in October 2020.
V15 will increase the ring size of Monero from the current 11, to 16. It will also make multiple fixes to Monero’s multiple signature mechanism. Popularly referred to as ‘multisig’, the multiple signature mechanism essentially requires a transaction to be accompanied by multiple signatures, in order to qualify for submission to and execution on the Monero network. The ring size, in this context, implies the total number of signatures required in a ring signature.
A type of digital signature, a ring signature involves a signers’ group which when merged together leads to the creation of a single, unique signature, which can be used for transaction authorization.
With V15 upgrade we will also witness the introduction of something called “Bulletproof+”, an important upgrade to the earlier-deployed Bulletproof technology on the Monero network, back in 2018. This upgrade will make sure that any info contained inside a confidential transaction isn’t false by any means.
