It's officially the season of forks and merges, with the Monero hard fork set to go live later this month.
With the Ethereum merge date drawing closer than ever, alongside the Cardano Vasil Hard Fork, another leading altcoin Monero is also getting a new hard fork upgrade.
The update will unveil a set of new features for users, including changes in the network's ring and transaction size. Let's now explore in depth what this new Monero hard fork is all about.
Monero network upgrade set for August release
Leading cryptocurrency Monero has also announced its new network upgrade via a hard fork which is already live on the network.
With this hard fork upgrade, Monero is levelling up its offerings. It will introduce new features to its users, including an increase in its ring size from 11 to 16. This is dubbed as "the largest ever absolute increase in the base anonymity set."
The network will also be upgrading its bulletproof algorithms, which will significantly help in lowering the transaction size by 5.7% and aid in improving the typical verification performance of the network by nearly 5.7%. This will assist in making transactions incredibly fast and light.
The upgrade will also be working towards introducing a view tags facility. Monero states this is "a brilliant way to reduce the wallet syncs by 40-50%."
Other major updates include changes in the fee infrastructure, and bug fixes, alongside improvements in security, resilience, and strength of the network as a whole.
Crypto exchange Binance has extended its support to the upcoming Monero hard fork upgrade adding that it will "all technical requirements involved for all users holding XMR in their Binance accounts."
Monero Hard Fork release date
The Monero hard fork upgrade is already live on the network.
This hard fork upgrade was earlier announced in April, with a full set of updates rolling out in batches.
It initially had a release date set for July, but was pushed back to August at the start of July. TIn a statement, Monero said:
The release was delayed due to required multi-sig security fixes and hardware wallet-related delays.
Monero price
Much was made about the Monero price when the hard fork was first announced in April. After the announcement, it surged 22%.
However, since then the price of Monero (XMR) has followed the general crypto market prices, crashing in May and June, before gradually seeing a slight recovery.
As of August 15, it is trading at $166.48 - down 4.85% in 24 hours.