Monero has been one of the most interesting projects in the space to date. One of the reasons for this is that the project was fairly launched back in 2014 through the Bitcointalk forum after forking and further improving the code of Bytecoin, a coin with solid tech that was premined by their developers.

Monero is between the few projects that offer complete account and transaction anonymity to its user, but it had a slight drawback before the recent network upgrade. Transactions were rather on the expensive side, users were upset from time-to-time that fees charged by the network were on-par with credit card fees and legacy banking fees. This was the direct result of how the blockchain handled transactions. more data takes up more space in the blocks, which in turn makes it more expensive. With Monero users send private transactions, which utilize a technology called Ring Confidential Transactions, to hide both the sender and the amounts transacted from the preying eye.

Monero Bulletproof Fork

Now the latest addition is a technology called Bulletproofs, which swaps out the currently used cryptographic proof scheme of the private transactions to an alternative method that uses less space and validates faster resulting in lower transaction costs and a faster blockchain overall.

The hard fork that lead to the implementation of Bulletproof was successfully achieved a few days ago, leading to a plummet in overall transaction costs. The image taken from bitinfocharts showcases a drop from 60 cents to a low of 2 cents, which now takes on even the cheapest non-private blockchains.

Exchange fees

The current progress in fees also resulted in exchanges adjusting their withdrawal fees to compete with the current market and each other.

First Bittrex announced the adjusting of Monero withdrawal costs:

Update: With the Monero upgrade to Bulletproof transactions, @BittrexExchange has reduced the $XMR withdrawal fee to 0.0001 XMR. pic.twitter.com/9ea1wYR1is — Bittrex (@BittrexExchange) October 25, 2018

Later on Binance also adjusted their fees accordingly:

With the recent activation of Bulletproofs on #Monero, #Binance has lowered #XMR withdrawal fees to 0.0001 $XMR.

Thank you to the community for your feedback. pic.twitter.com/szVzaGiuE0 — Binance (@binance) October 26, 2018

Overall this means that exchanges went with an over 99% fee reduction.