Monero's Next Major Update: Hard Fork Consensus Reached

Leading privacy-centric cryptocurrency Monero XMR/USD is headed towards another major update to its protocol, purportedly making its anonymity more robust, its fees lower and usage less tedious.

What Happened: Monero developers confirmed that the coin's community reached the consensus that the coin will initiate a mainnet hard fork at block height 2,668,888 — expected to take place on July 16, Cointelegraph reported on Monday.

This hard fork will increase Monero's chainring size from 11 to 16, implement bulletproofs, and make changes to the blockchain's properties. 

The additional ring signatures are expected to increase the anonymity set and make it much harder to reverse-engineer transaction sources whereas the view tags could reduce the time needed to check a wallet's balance and transactions by up to 40%.

Furthermore, Monero's block size was approved to grow 14 times per year instead of 32 times, which should result in lower transaction fees. Bulletproofs are an exotic zero-knowledge proof cryptographic system that allow for range proofs — resulting in faster encryption and verification. 

According to Monero's website, thanks to bulletproofs "proving a big set of data only generates a small proof, and the size of this proof grows logarithmically with the size of the data being proved."