Monero Transaction Fees are Down 97% Since the Hard Fork


cryptojacking monero

Following the successful execution of Monero’s hard fork on October 18, average transaction fees for XMR users have fallen a massive 97 percent from 60 cents to an average of just 2 cents according to information from CoinMetrics.

Known as “Monero 0.13.0 Beryllium Bullet”, the recent hard fork implemented a trustless, non-interactive, zero-knowledge framework called “Bulletproofs” for the privacy coin, which enabled XMR transaction details to be hidden from public blockchain validation.

“Bulletproofs” Makes Monero “Unfairly Cheap”

Writing on Twitter, CoinMetrics confirmed the massive drop in Monero transaction fees, adding that average transaction size has fallen over 83 percent from 18.5kb pre-fork to just 3kb.

It will be recalled that on October 18, Russian news platform Forklog reported that the Monero hard fork took effect on block 1685555, with version of the software and Bulletproofs executed on block 1686275. CCN earlier reported that Bulletproofs was introduced to the Monero community as the solution to a number of extant problems including providing enhanced privacy with faster and cheaper transactions, and greater resistance to ASIC miners, which the Monero development community sees as a centralisation risk.

To achieve this, Bulletproofs shrinks the size of cryptographic proofs it uses, which in turns leads to an over 80% decrease in transaction size. As a result of this, Monero now requires substantially less disk storage space than it used to. Already XMR miners have reported that mining difficulty has dropped significantly since the hard fork, which is in the line the vision of its developers to be open for mining to all users and not just corporate ASIC mining farms as is the case with bitcoin.

Speaking on Twitter after Coinmetrics released its data, Monero lead developer Ricardo Spagni said:

As shown in the 1-year chart covering October 2017 to October 2018, Monero’s transaction fees have dropped to an all-time low, which is a significant achievement at a time when the coin’s total market cap stands at a 3-day high of $1,730,663,942 with a 24-hour trading volume of $12,937,507 according to CoinMarketCap. Despite dropping more than 70 percent from an all-time high of about $460 in December 2017 to about $105, Monero remains popular with privacy advocates, amidst whispers of it being the coin of preference for cybercriminals carrying out illegal activities like cryptojacking.

In July, CCN reported that Monero completed its first audit for the Bulletproofs protocol after it was put forward as a solution to the general scalability problem of blockchains by Stanford’s Applied Cryptography Group (ACG) alongside University College London and Blockstream.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

Follow us on Telegram or subscribe to our newsletter here.
• Join CCN’s crypto community for $9.99 per month, click here.
• Want exclusive analysis and crypto insights from Hacked.com? Click here.
• Open Positions at CCN: Full Time and Part Time Journalists Wanted.

Advertisement


Source