The super private cryptocurrency Monero just got a little software upgrade, which the monero team is calling a Hard Fork, though there is no actual fork happening resulting in a different coin.

The Monero community has something called the Monero Research Lab where new ideas are tested and verified, and if a consensus is reached integrated into the monero software that results in the so called Monero Network upgrade aka Hard Fork.

There are a couple of noticeable enhancements that went in the upgrade:

• Support for CLSAG transaction format
  • Monero uses ring signatures that provides the privacy features of the cryptocurrency.With ring signatures, the transactions submitted to the network are in such a format that the transaction amount, the wallet address of the sender and that of the receiver are hidden cryptographically, and invisible on the blockchain metadata.To achieve this Monero already used the MLSAG. The CLSAG replaces the former and brings in certain key advantages:
    • Efficiency - Same features with less transaction size.
    • Efficient Signature Verification - Monero software can now verify the transactions with less CPU cycles.
    • Better Cryptographic Constructs - Which basically means the the new transaction format covers an even wider attack vectors, and comes out unscathed from those risks.
• Deterministic unlock times
  • This basically was a vulnerability that Justin Ehrenhofer figured out some time back.
  • The root cause of the issue was due to the fact that monero software only took the local time zone of the m/c running the software into consideration while calculating the unlock times, rather than matching it with the network time on the monero network.
• Randomized delay when forwarding transactions from i2p/tor -> ipv4/6
  • This can further improve on the privacy, as the exit times of the packets on tor nodes can't be tracked and matched as it hits the vanilla ipv4/6 network.
• Other minor enhancements can be referred in the official release notes on github.

The users/miners would need to upgrade their monero software so as to continue operating on the network.

The official desktop wallets along with the android community accepted wallet monerujo also has been updated to reap advantages of this network upgrade.So if you happen to use monero, dont waste a second!

Let me know if this post has helped you. I am constantly improving my novice blogging skills with each post.

P.S If you value privacy, please have a look at my other posts specifically the one that describes how to setup pi-hole on your home network for all-device-adblocking!

I have plans to write other articles which will be part of this privacy series on my blog here.

Cheers, and thanks for paying attention.