Monero Completes Hard Fork Upgrade: Enhanced Privacy, ASIC Resistance, and Security

Monero successfully completed a protocol upgrade (hard fork) on its blockchain on March 9. The upgrade included adjustments to the Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm for better ASIC resistance, changes to mitigate big bang attacks, and increased transaction homogeneity for enhanced privacy.

Monero, one of the most watched privacy coins, has successfully completed its scheduled protocol upgrade today. Although this update includes many small changes, three of them are relatively more important.

First, the upgrade adjusts Monero’s proof-of-work algorithm, CryptoNight-R, to suppress ASIC miners on the current network and further maintain ASIC resistance. Therefore, miners will need to update their software.

Second, the upgrade addresses a fringe attack event known as the big bang attack.

“A big bang is when an attacker sends a large number of transactions (spamming) (or rapid adoption) that can cause the demand for computing resources to grow exponentially within a few hours, overwhelming the network beyond the capacity of the existing Monero infrastructure.”

According to a post on Monero’s GitHub, Dr. Mitchell Krawiec-Thayer, founder of the Noncesense research lab,

The above problem actually stems from the limitations of Monero's "determining its block size" model. Monero's block size limit is set to the average (median) of the latest 100 blocks produced. This means that when the network is under pressure, the block size will increase exponentially within a two-minute block time.

According to Thayer, if the network was attacked, it would take less than two days for the block size to grow to 10 TB and “bring down” “almost all” full nodes on the network. Today’s update addresses these issues and makes some improvements to the block size algorithm to mitigate them.

The third change is the improvement of the "homogeneity or sameness" of transaction currencies. This update introduces dummy encrypted data for each transaction, making it more difficult to distinguish different money flows and making it more difficult for external blockchain analysis to determine the source of payments, thereby further increasing payment privacy.

According to the Monero GitHub, all of the upgrades discussed above are “deemed safe” by the Monero Research Lab. The Monero community has been committed to continuously building and improving its blockchain to achieve “fast, private, and secure” digital cash.