Monero, a leading privacy-centric cryptocurrency, has undergone a hard fork in recent days – producing a new Monero chain in addition to the now renamed ‘Monero Classic’. The fork was initiated to protect Monero against mining centralization, as Bitmain had developed ASIC units purpose-built for mining XMR tokens.
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Monero Announces Network Upgrade
On the 28th of March, Monero announced that it had scheduled a major upgrade for April 6th – which would see network undergo a hard fork.
The official announcement gave two primary outcomes that it intended to achieve through the fork. “First, a PoW tweak to curb any potential threat of ASIC and preserved ASIC resistance, and “Second, the minimum ring size is bumped to 7.” Monero’s expansion in minimum ring size was executed in order to strengthen the privacy afforded by XMR.
It was revealed last month that Bitmain had developed a new ASIC product specifically developed to mine Monero, creating a perceived urgency to fork among developers.
ASIC Resistance Long-Running Concern Among Monero Developers
In February, Monero published a document outlining its position regarding maintaining ASIC resistance for the cryptocurrency. The post set out Monero’s then “somewhat formal stance” regarding ASIC – stating the developers’ “intention to maintain ASIC resistance by swiftly reacting to any potential threat from ASICs and considering slightly modifying the PoW at every hard fork” due to “any newly developed ASIC […] obtain[ing] a significant majority of the network hashrate and introduc[ing] centralization.”
Resisting mining centralization is described as a core value of the Monero project, with Monero stating that XMR “was forked from the Cryptonote reference implementation” that sought to “create a more egalitarian mining network
