Monero has just announced that they will be upgrading their network on November 30. At the same time, they have set a tentative schedule for code freeze and the release of v0.15. This is according to a recent blog post released by the Monero Developer Community.

Monero Network Upgrade

Monero’s hard fork is expected to be taking place on November 30, 2019. The information was released by community members dEBRUYNE and ErCiccione.

The information was released in order to prepare users, merchants, pool operators and exchanges. As per the blog post, Monero users should run CLI v0.15 or GUI v0.15.

In addition to it, the scheduled dates include a code freeze for October 24 and the official release of v0.15 on October 31.

The new upgrade will introduce a new long-term Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm called RandomX. That means that miners will have to update their mining software as well.

This RandomX PoW algorithm has been optimized for general-purpose CPUs. It also uses random code execution and several memory-hard techniques that minimize the efficiency advantage of specialized hardware.

At the same time, efficient mining will require more than 2GiB of memory, which is difficult to hide in an infected computer. Moreover, web mining is also infeasible due to large memory requirement and the lack of directed rounding support for floating operations in Javascript and WebAssembly.

Many malicious parties in the market were using crypto miners to steal users CPU and miner the XMR cryptocurrency.

The new upgrade will also be phasing out long payments ID to improve privacy and user experience. Furthermore, it will also reduce support work for services and exchanges.

The main reason behind phasing out long payment IDs is related to the fact that it has proven to be detrimental to privacy and a source of negative user experience. This could potentially link the transaction of a user in case of reusage, among other things.

Finally, the v0.15 version will also enforce the ten-block lock time for incoming transactions will be enforced on the protocol levels to improve privacy for the user and the whole Monero network.

The official blog post reads as follows:

“Services still utilizing long payment IDs are thus reminded to upgrade to either integrated addresses or subaddresses as soon as possible.”

Users, companies and interested parties can contact the Monero developer community if any assistance is required.