Privacy coin Monero (XMR) jumps following its hardfork announcement

• Privacy coin Monero (XMR) makes big gains on the announcement of the upcoming hard fork in July.
• Some Monero community members recently shared concerns that centralized exchanges have been misrepresenting their XMR reserves.

Privacy coin Monero (XMR) has managed to beat the broader cryptocurrency market which remains volatile. Over the last week, the XMR price has surged by 22 percent after developers confirmed the arrival of hardfork in July this year.

As of press time, XMR is trading at a price of $280 with a market cap above $5 billion. This makes Monero one of the top-performing digital assets among other privacy coins.

Details of the Monero Hardfork

As shared by Monero developers, the Monero network has passed a community consensus for initiating the mainnet hardfork at block height 2,668,888. The privacy hardfork will include increasing the chain’s ring size from 11 to 16. The hardfork will further add view tags to outputs for reducing the wallet scanning time. Furthermore, it will also introduce bulletproofs to implement the fee changes.

Increasing the number of ring signatures will ensure that the transactions have greater anonymity. This will make it further hard to identify the source of the transaction.

One of the developers noted that view tags can reduce the network scanning time by 40 percent which will help to derive the public output key for anonymous transactions. The developers have further approved changes to boost Monero block size from 14x to now at 32x per year. Also, the zero-knowledge proving system Bulletproofs will be used for range proofs in Monero. This feature will lead to faster verification and encryption of the block.

Monero and regulatory concerns

Although Monero (XMR) is heading for a major hardfork ahead, regulators have always expressed their concerns with the use of these privacy coins. These privacy coins use cryptographic techniques to obscure identity information such as transaction amounts and addresses.

Privacy coins like Monero and ZCash use a technique called zero-knowledge proofs. Thus, users can make transactions without specifying the details of the transactions in question. Furthermore, Monero’s “obfuscated ledger” allows centralized exchanges to misrepresent their reserves to the public. Thus, the use of privacy coins like Monero has remained a controversial topic among the crypto community.

Some of the Monero community members have shared concerns that centralized exchanges have been misrepresenting their XMR reserves. Some of the accused CEXs are Huobi, Binance, etc. Thus, the community is planning for a bank run to root out such shady exchanges.

Monero’s obfuscated ledger has enabled a number of exchanges to misrepresent their reserves, and sell XMR that they don’t actually have, knowing that all too many of us will never withdraw, and no one can see onchain the evidence of their misdeeds.