Monero’s Privacy-Focused Crypto Protocol Upgrade Is Now Live

The non-contentious hard fork to upgrade one of crypto’s most popular privacy protocols, Monero, was successfully completed today. The fork took place at block 2,688,888 (18:47 UTC) and enhances the network with a host of new privacy-preserving features:
The number of signers for a ring signature has been increased from 11 to 16 for every transaction. Ring signatures are digital signatures that can be produced by any member in a group. It should be computationally infeasible to determine which key (from that group of keys) was used to create the signature. Ring signatures make it impossible to trace the origin of a Monero transaction.
The previous Bulletproofs algorithm was upgraded to “Bulletproofs+.” Bulletproofs are zero-knowledge proofs that enable confidential transactions. Bulletproofs+ reduces transaction size and increases transaction speed. Overall performance is expected to improve by 5-7%.
View tags are a new way to speed up wallet syncing by 30-40%. Wallets that support monero include Ledger and Trezor, two popular hardware wallets. Cake wallet is a hot wallet that was originally exclusive to monero but now also supports bitcoin (BTC), litecoin (LTC) and haven (XHV).
Fee changes will minimize fee volatility and improve overall network security.
Multisignature functionality has been improved and critical security patches were added.
The price of XMR is holding steady, currently trading at $165.80 at the time of publication.