Monero, the privacy-oriented decentralized cryptocurrency project, underwent a planned hard fork event on Saturday, introducing new features to boost its privacy and security. The network upgrade was delayed from July 13, when it was first planned for release, due to multi-sig security fixes, critical security patches, and more time needed to resolve hardware wallet incompatibility issues. Completed at block 2,688,888, the hard fork now features a larger ring size (from 11 to 16), an improved ‘Bulletproofs’ algorithm for faster transactions, a revamped multisig mechanism, and performance upgrades that reduce wallet sync times by 30-40%. This upgrade is a hard fork sitting on 0.18 ‘Fluorine Fermi’, so the new version isn’t backward compatible with older ones. Hence, those who want to continue using Monero will have to upgrade their software (monerod, monero-wallet-cli, monero-wallet-gui). Users of hardware wallets will need a firmware update from the device vendor to continue using them.
Full story : Monero hard fork makes hackers’ favorite coin even more private.