Monero’s “Bulletproofs” Upgrade Lowers XMR Transaction Fees to Near Zero

Monero, the open source cryptocurrency project with a strong focus on privacy, fungibility, and decentralization, is now “bulletproof.” Last Thursday, October 18, the Monero network underwent a system wide upgrade that involved the activation of bulletproofs.

Monero Activates BulletProofs

Bulletproofs is a highly anticipated form of cryptography that increases the privacy of digital currency transactions while at the same time significantly decreasing their size. The reduced transaction size has resulted in the dramatic decrease of Monero fees by 96%. Fees fell from $0.54 on Thursday to a mere $0.021 cents on Saturday.

Monero’s average transaction size is now 3kb versus a pre-fork average of 18.5kb. Below is a visual representation of the transaction size decrease since the implementation of bulletproofs.

In the chart below, we can see that Monero fees fell from a recent high of $0.80 to anaverage of around $0.02 since the implementation of bulletproofs.

Not only does the bulletproofs upgrade increase privacy and decrease transaction fees, it also opens the door to additional use cases.

According to “hyc”, one of Monero’s core developers, the upgrade “definitely [makes] the notion of micropayments more palatable again.”

In light of this new bulletproofs upgrade, Monero is back on everybody’s radar and the team at the Monero Research Lab are celebrating bulletproofs implementation. In fact, Sarang Noether, a cryptographer for Monero who worked on bulletproofs implementations recently said, “it’s gonna be great seeing the blockchain growth charts.”

Additional Upgrades

In addition to the bulletproofs upgrade, the hard fork that initiated the upgrade included a slight consensus mechanism shift to defer the threat of Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners.

The new code included in this upgrade further improves the ASIC resistance Monero is known for, and put an end to the arrival of CryptoNight ASICs. With CryptoNight ASICs out of the picture, the Monero network has deferred the threat of recentralization and maintains their decentralized network.

Final Thoughts

The success of a significant upgrade like bulletproofs goes to show just how much progress and development is going on in projects like Monero.

Despite the dramatic decrease in price from an all-time high of nearly $500 to a current price of $105, Monero’s network and development continues to improve.