One hard fork later, there are four new Monero projects.
Monero hard forked to version 12 of its protocol yesterday. But not everyone is on board. Following the example once set by Ethereum Classic, some users are continuing on the pre-hard fork Monero blockchain… though in this case not as a single project. Now there is Monero Classic, Monero 0 (XMZ), Monero Original (XMO) and a second project by the name Monero Classic (XMC) (which in this article we will refer to as Monero-Classic); these are all continuing on version 11 of the Monero protocol. Of course, this means they are all still compatible on a single network, using the same asset (coin) — just with different names.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
Here’s the story of the pre-hard fork Monero blockchain and the four different projects keeping it alive.
The Hard Fork
As an ongoing protocol upgrade process, Monero has made a habit of hard forking once every six months. The latest hard fork introduced several new features, including an increased ring-size for more private but also bigger (thus more resource-intensive) transactions, multi-signature transactions, initial Ledger Nano S hardware wallet support, and more.
The latest hard fork also introduced a tweak to Monero’s CryptoNight proof-of-work hashing algorithm. This backwards-incompatible change makes all existing ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) mining hardware useless. Such specialized hardware is a bigger concern on the CryptoNight hashing algorithm than most other hashing algorithms, as it could let ASIC miners launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on non-ASIC miners and non-mining nodes on the network.
The risks presented by ASIC-mining hardware appeared to be reason why at least most of Monero’s development and user community agreed on the change. However,
