Monero is finally useable as currency! Monero (XMR) underwent a successful hard fork on October 18th, and the result of that hard fork is that transaction fees have plummeted an impressive 97%, from $0.60 cents to an average of just $.02 cents, according to information from CoinMetrics.
Known as “Monero 0.13.0 Beryllium Bullet”, the hard fork implemented a trustless, non-interactive, zero-knowledge framework called “Bulletproofs” for XMR. This enabled XMR transaction details to be hidden from public blockchain validation.
It was on Twitter that CoinMetrics confirmed the massive drop in transaction fees for XMR. It also added that the average transaction size had fallen over 83% from 18.5kb pre-fork to just 3kb.
Forklog, a Russian news platform, reported that the Monero hard fork took effect on block 1685555, with the software and Bulletproofs executed on block 1686275. Bulletproofs was introduced to the XMR community as a solution to a number of problems, chiefly, enchanced privacy with faster and cheaper transactions, as well as a greater resistance to ASIC miners, which was seen as a centralization risk.
Bulletproofs provided a solution to the problems presented by the community for their cryptocurrency. XMR now requires substantially less disk storage space than it used to. XMR miners have already reported that mining difficulty has dropped significantly since the hard fork – something that the developers wanted to see, since they wanted XMR mining to be accessible for many users, not just corporate ASIC mining farms as is the case with Bitcoin.
Ricardo Spagni, XMR’s lead developer, said “Monero is now unfairly cheap” on Twitter.
He’s not wrong. If you look at XMR’s 1 year chart, covering October of 2017 to today, XMR’s transaction fees have dropped to an all-time low, which is a significant achievement at a time when the coin’s total marketcap stands at a 3-day high of $1,730,663,942 with a 24-hour trading volume of $12,937,507 according to CoinMarketCap.
XMR has dropped more than 70% of its all-time high of around $460 at the end of 2017 to about $105.00 today, but XMR remains intensely popular with privacy advocates. Rumors and whispers persist that this is the coin of preference for cybercriminals carrying out illegal activities like cryptojacking.
In July, CCN reported that XMR had completed its first audit for the Bulletproofs protocol after it was put forward as a working solution to the general scalability problem of blockchains by Stanford’s Applied Cryptography Group (ACG) and University College London and Blockstream.
What do you think? Do you hold any XMR? Do you see this as bullish? Will this help spur mass adoption since it’s so cheap? We’ve talked about how 100k ATMs will soon have the ability to sell Bitcoin to the general public. When do you think mass adoption will happen? We’re seeing some tremendous news coming out for institutional investors, and now we have some good news for retail investors. What do you think? Let us know on our Facebook page!
