Monero, the 10th biggest cryptocurrency network has witnessed a steep drop in its transaction charges thanks to a successful system upgrade that took effect last Thursday.
Reports from CoinMetrics show that the execution of the network’s hard fork scheduled for October 18th saw the transaction charges of the XMR fall by an estimated 95% from an average of 60 cents per transaction to just 2 cents for the same transaction in a single week.
‘Monero 0.13.0 Beryllium Bullet’
The upgrade saw Monero’s system equipped with “Bulletproofs”, a new form of a zero-knowledge, trustless and non-interactive cryptography with the ability to hide XMR transaction information from the public blockchain validation. The new feature aims to boost the scalability of Monero’s privacy features by reorganizing the verification process for the network’s confidential transactions.
Dramatic shift
CoinMetrics also confirmed that accompanying the steep fall in transaction fees, XMR average transaction size had also slumped from a massive 18.5kb to averagely 3kb per transaction.
The significant shift had already been forecasted by a Monero developer in a past interview who had already seen the transaction charges drop by over 95%. “I think you can safely say atypical transaction fee goes down by more than 95%” ‘Moneromoo’, a Monero core developer remarked adding that the charges may even subside further depending on the type of transaction initiated.
A crypto-privacy boost
‘Bulletproofs’ is a product of conjoined effort between Benedikt Bunz of Stamford University and Jonathan Bootle of University College of London. Though initially developed for Bitcoin, the new tech has already been absorbed by Monero and mimblewimble with Litecoin creators also eyeing for the same.
Bulletproofs has already been hyped as a game changer in the crypto market space offering codes which not only guarantee transaction privacy but also simple for use by blockchains.
Monero aims to reap big from the new tech favorite especially to users and enterprises who evidently desire some degree of privacy on their transactions as had early been echoed by bulletproofs co-developer Bunz
“I wouldn’t want my salary to be made public, and if you run a business you don’t want to say publicly how much you are paying your supplier” Bunz stated adding that it does not take one to be an ideologist to understand that confidentiality for money is a basic requirement.
Alongside bulletproofs, the Hard Fork also installed other privacy features to help boost privacy on the Monero network including a special code that will bar manufacturers from developing unauthorized hardware specialized for mining Monero.
https://www.coindesk.com/monero-fees-fall-to-almost-zero-after-bulletproofs-upgrade/