Privacy Focused Monero Plans Hard Fork in July; XMR Surges 11% on ‘Monerun’

Privacy protocol Monero will undergo a tentative hard fork in July which would see improved network security and fee changes, developers confirmed in a GitHub post. A testnet deployment is expected in May.

No separate coin will be issued after the mainnet hard fork at a block height of 2,668,888, which is expected to be in July. Hard forks refer to a change to a blockchain protocol that renders older versions invalid.

Monero is a privacy-centric protocol that masks the wallet addresses of users making it difficult for others to trace and track transactions. This is unlike bitcoin (BTC) or other cryptocurrencies, where wallet addresses and transactional behavior can be analyzed to determine the identity of their users.

July’s hard fork will be Monero’s fifteenth software version (V15). The previous two versions went live in October 2020 and introduced marginal upgrades.

V15 would see an increase in Monero’s ring size from 11 to 16 alongside fixes to its multiple signature (multisig) mechanism. As per developer documents, multisig refers to a transaction which needs multiple signatures before it can be submitted to the Monero network and executed, while ring size refers to the total number of signers in a ring signature.

A ring signature is a type of digital signature in which a group of possible signers is merged together to produce a single, distinctive signature that can authorize a transaction.

The V15 upgrade would also introduce “bulletproof+,” an upgrade to the bulletproof technology deployed on Monero in 2018 which ensures that the information stored within a confidential transaction doesn't contain any false information.

XMR, the native tokens of Monero, surged some 11% in the past 24 hours as developers confirmed the July hard fork.

Prices spiked to as much as $277 on Monday night, breaking over a major resistance level at $240. Prices slumped to the $257 level at the time of writing.

However, a Bloomberg report pegged a separate catalyst driving demand for the tokens on a seemingly coordinated effort from Monero community members on Reddit.

“April 18th. We're withdrawing XMR from exchanges. Any exchange that hasn't disabled withdraws (which many of them have already), we're pulling our funds,” a popular post titled “The Monerun” from last week stated. The date also marked eight years since Monero was initially launched.

Community members allege Monero's obfuscated ledger has allowed crypto exchanges to misrepresent their reserves and sell XMR “that they don't actually have.” The bank run of sorts entices community members to pull their holdings from exchanges. This is in a bid to test if the exchanges actually hold XMR or not.

Exchanges Binance, Bitfinex and HitBTC did not return requests for comment on the "Monerun" allegations. The three attract some of the highest XMR trading volumes among all other crypto exchanges.