Monero is one of the most important privacy protocols in the ecosystem. On August 13, a hard fork took place to improve several privacy and security features offered by the network.
The Hard Fork was successfully performed on Block 2,688,888 thanks to a joint effort of more than 70 developers, after 4 months since its announcement.
The Hard fork brought several fixes to the internal multi-signature mechanism to facilitate the exchange of information such as key records and data synchronization between wallets.
“Multisig means that a transaction requires several signatures before it can be transmitted to the Monero network and executed. Instead of a Monero wallet creating, signing and transmitting transactions all by itself, you have a whole group of wallets and the cooperation between them to carry out transactions.”
The number of co-signers required to approve ring signatures has also been increased from 11 to 16. Ring signatures ensure that the origin of transactions in the network cannot be traced. A feature that makes Monero the most popular cryptocurrency among privacy enthusiasts.
In terms of security, the bulletproof algorithm has been switched to Bulletproof+. This is a zero-knowledge proof algorithm that was implemented in 2018 to strengthen the privacy of the network. This hides the exact transaction amounts and only shows the origin and destination of the transaction.
Another improvement that comes with the hard fork is the display of tags. This is a new option that makes it possible to speed up wallet synchronization by 30% to 40%. This is the key to increasing the overall performance of the entire ecosystem of Monero.
The Monero Hard Fork represents a major departure from Bitcoin’s security model, as it provides a constant incentive for miners to rely on “reasonable fees” to ensure the security and untraceability of the network.
The hard fork is the fifteenth update of Monero and will probably not be the last to bring further improvements in terms of privacy and network security.
