Network upgrade and release 0.15

Posted by: dEBRUYNE / ErCiccione

Dear participants of the Monero ecosystem,

A tentative schedule for the upcoming scheduled network upgrade has been set. The schedule is as follows:

October 24 - Code freeze

October 31 - Targeted v0.15 release date

November 30 - Network upgrade

Thus, approximately the 30th of November there will be a scheduled network upgrade on the Monero network. To be sufficiently prepared, a user, service, merchant, pool operator, or exchange should run CLI v0.15 or GUI v0.15. The scheduled network upgrade introduces a few major changes. First and foremost, a new long-term Proof-of-Work algorithm, namely RandomX, will be introduced. Miners therefore ought to upgrade their mining software as well. Second, long payment IDs will be phased out in order to improve privacy and user experience as well as reduce support work for services and exchanges. Third, transactions will now require at least two outputs. Fourth, the ten block (approximately twenty minutes) lock time for incoming transactions will be enforced on the protocol level. Both these changes will improve privacy for the user as well as for the whole network.

To reiterate, following our earlier announcement, long payment IDs will be phased out in this scheduled network upgrade.

Services still utilizing long payment IDs are thus reminded to upgrade to either integrated addresses or subaddresses as soon as possible. If any assistance is required, feel free to contact the Monero dev community at #monero-dev (freenode - IRC, Riot/Matrix, MatterMost).

Note that a preliminary information thread regarding the scheduled network upgrade has been posted on Reddit that contains more elaborate information for users and miners.

Kind regards,

The Monero dev community